Podcasts about google hardware

This week we covered: Meta Meta's $499.99 Quest 3 headset is all about mixed reality and video games Xbox Cloud Gaming is coming to Meta Quest 3 in December Google The Google Pixel 8 is official with 7 years of updates The Pixel Watch 2 is official with a Snapdragon W5 chip Google's Tensor G3 chip is focused on speeding up AI for the Pixel 8 phones Rumours Folding iPad as soon as 2024, says report – but 2025 more likely As always, we'd love to hear your comments Find us on Twitter @WeeklyTechRant

Today’s episode is about your brain on art with Ivy Ross, the Vice President of Design for the Hardware organization at Google. Ivy Ross is the Vice President of Design for the Hardware organization at Google. Over the past six years, she and her team have launched 50+ products winning over 240 global design awards. This collection of hardware established a new Google design aesthetic that is tactile, colorful, and bold. A winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Ivy’s innovative metalwork in jewelry is in the permanent collections of 12 international museums. Ninth on Fast Company’s list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2019, Ivy believes the intersection of arts and science is where the most engaging and creative ideas are found. Her latest book, Your Mind on Art is available wherever books are sold. We talk about the following and much more: ✅ Why she says that art is the language of humanity ✅ How art affects our emotions and mental state ✅ Why is art so transformative and valuable in our culture ✅ What does art have to do with mental health or well-being ✅ Some simple ways we can incorporate more art into our lives ✅ What role creativity plays in the human mind ✅ How can art help us to process and express our feelings ✅ How art reflects and shapes cultural values and norms This episode is sponsored by BloodMoonBox.com If you’d like to join the waitlist for my next coaching program, sign up here: https://www.yasmeenturayhi.com/gateways-to-awakening/ Please tag us and tell us what you loved! You can follow @Gateways_To_Awakening on Instagram or Facebook if you’d like to stay connected.

Die Google Pixel Watch - eine halbfertige Totgeburt!Ich bin, als die ersten Smartwatches auf den Markt kamen, mit der Pebble ganz vorn dabei gewesen. In der zweiten Welle habe ich mich, was sich als glückliches Händchen herausstellen sollte, für das Modell von Samsung entschieden. Als Nächstes folgte das Modell von Motorola - rund und doch nicht 100 Prozent Display. Dank eines Besuchs in Dubai habe ich auf die HUAWEI gewechselt. Dann war aber die Lust raus, die zweite Welle war vorbei. Wer macht heute schon noch erfolgreich Android-Uhren? Ja, seit Neuestem Google selbst: aber ich sage es gleich, der große Wurf ist die Google Pixel Watch auf jeden Fall nicht. Und das ist für jedermann beim Einrichten sofort ersichtlich! Ein Google Handy spricht mit einem Google Gerät und die meistgezeigte Meldung ist diese! Muss ich mehr sagen? / Bild-/Quelle: privat Das Gerücht, dass Google eine eigene Uhr auf den Markt bringt, ist so alt wie die Smartwatch unter Android. Aber, gekommen ist nie was. Noch nicht mal, als Google plötzlich aus unverständlichen Gründen gerade Fitbit kaufen musste. Nein, keine Uhr in Sicht. Wobei - gibt es Fitbit eigentlich noch oder hat Google das auch klammheimlich eingestellt? Nein, Spaß, oder tödlicher Ernst beiseite, Fitbit lebt. Noch. Immerhin gibt es mit der Google Watch ein halbes Jahr Fitbit Premium umsonst. Jahrespreis knapp 80 Euro. Wofür genau, hat sich mir nicht wirklich erschlossen. Aber egal, die sechs Monate nehme ich mit, gekündigt sind sie auch schon. Aber der Reihe nach und nun oute ich mich auch: Ich produziere wegen viel Arbeit aktuell wann immer möglich Blogposts und Podcasts im Voraus. Die Zeilen zu der Uhr schreibe ich aktuell am 15.10., direkt nach Zustellung. Ich fürchte aber, dass ihr das frühestens zweite Novemberwoche lesen und hören werdet. Ich hoffe aber ganz schwer, dass Google bis dahin viel über die obligatorischen Updates für die Hard- und Software nachgebessert hat! Warum? Wer ist jetzt bereit für {productName}? Tja, doppelt peinlich, von einer Google App dies für das neue Top-Google-Modell zu erfahren! / Bild-/Quelle: privat Weil man der Uhr und auch den Apps, die man benötigt, anmerkt, dass alles mit heißer Nadel gestrickt wurde und nichts fehlerfrei oder erwartungsgemäß funktioniert. So - zurückspielen und ganz von Anfang! Auspacken - und sofort merken, dass das mitgelieferte Armband nichts taugt / Bild-/Quelle: privat Google hat mal wieder viel Energie in die Verpackung gelegt. Der erste Teil geht leicht, aber sobald man an das Ladekabel will, greift man sich ob der Verklebung und den versteckten Laschen einfach nur ans Hirn. Sagt also nicht, ich hätte euch nicht gewarnt! Wenn die Uhr dann mal im Freien ist und ihr vielleicht so wie ich noch die alte Wear OS-App auf eurem Telefon ist, werdet ihr nicht weiterkommen. Aber immerhin zeigt euch eine Meldung an, dass ihr die neue Watch-App laden müsst. Wenn die dann drauf ist, geht es an das Verbinden mit der Uhr. An sich ein einfacher Vorgang, da die Uhr eSIM, Bluetooth und WiFi unterstützt. Aber bitte, doch nicht bei Google! Ich sah, trotz mehrfachem Zurücksetzen auf Werkseinstellungen immer nur eine Fehlermeldung, dass eine Verbindung nicht hergestellt werden kann. 2022 lässt grüßen, Google, das ist mehr als peinlich! ...ja, aber nur, wenn die Verbindung zwischen Handy und Uhr endlich klappen würde! / Bild-/Quelle: privat Das Geheimnis, wie es klappt? Es hätte mir gleich einfallen können! Als ich mein erstes Jabra-Bluetooth-Headset mit einem Nokia oder SonyEricsson-Handy gepaart habe, musste man beide fast aufeinanderlegen. Und ja, die guten alten Zeiten hat Google auch nicht vergessen: es klappt nur, wenn Handy und Uhr sich idealerweise berühren! IN 2022, VERDAMMT NOCH MAL! SO NE SCHEIßE, GOOGLE! Noch besser wird es, wie es immer mit Google Hardware ist: kaum eingerichtet, kommen erste Updates, die Hard- und Software-Fehler bereinigen. So auch bei der Uhr! Wer also mehrfach der Anleitung folgend keine, ja, wirklich, keine Verbindung zustande bekommen hat und die Uhr, wie in der Hilfe beschrieben, auch mehrfach auf Werkseinstellungen zurückgesetzt hat, denkt sofort an: Zurücksetzen, einpacken und die gute alte Fliegeruhr wieder ans Handgelenk zu packen. Ich hatte da das erste Mal die Schnauze voll, noch keine fünf Minuten nach dem Auspacken. Dabei war der Akku zu 86 Prozent vorgeladen. Und Bluetooth schafft mit neuem Standard auch so seine 20 Meter. Nur nicht im Google-Universum, da muss die Uhr gewissermaßen auf dem Handy liegen - total undurchdacht, was die Bedienung des Bildschirmes angeht. Aber man hat viel Zeit, das Binden beider Geräte kann schon mal drei bis vier Minuten dauern. Und ja, wer dann auch noch die Fitbit-App nutzen möchte, macht den gleichen Zirkus abermals. VIER VERDAMMTE MINUTEN UM PER BLUETOOTH EINEN HALBFERTIGEN ELEKTROSCHROTT ZU VERBINDEN! Und nun, und das kennt jeder, der schon mal den Fehler gemacht hat und bei Google ein Gerät gekauft hat, kommt erst mal das erste große Update. So auch auf der Uhr. Auch hier gibt es wieder Leichtsinnsfehler für jeden, der weiß, wie man einen modernen Akku schont: Google zwingt einen, für das Laden und Installieren die Uhr in die Ladeschale zu packen. Vorteil: danach weiß man, wie heiß die Uhr werden kann - und die will man so niemals an seinem Handgelenk haben. Nachteil: das Update scheint per Brieftaube Bit für Bit über den Atlantik zu kommen, so dauert die unbekannte Größe mal schnell fast 'ne Stunde, bis sie geladen und installiert ist. Aber, laut Beschreibung, bessert sie nur die Sensoren für die Fitbit-App nach. Danke für nichts, Google! Also, kurze Zusammenfassung: Wenn die Uhr ausgepackt und in Betrieb genommen wird, muss erst die neue Watch-App geladen werden. Danach im Zuge der Einrichtung, die nur funktioniert, wenn die Uhr quasi auf dem Handydisplay liegt. Warum? Weil Bluetooth im Jahr 2022 noch nicht richtig aufgeweckt wurde. Und kurz danach muss das gleiche Spielchen mit der Fitbit-App passieren - auch hier die Uhr am besten auf das Display-Glas des Pixel-Handys tackern. Einfach nur peinlich. Selbst für ein halbfertig Produkt. Und wenn jetzt alle Hürden, die sich auch nicht scheuen, mehrfach aufzutreten, erledigt sind, kommt das obligatorische Update für die Uhr. Mittlerweile sind WiFi-Verbindungen vom Handy übernommen worden und aktiviert, Bluetooth sowieso und, wenn es euer Modell unterstützt, auch eine eSIM mit der Außenwelt verbunden. Aber Google scheint sich bei dem Update so zu schämen, dass sie keine Dateigröße angeben - bei mir hat es fast ne Stunde gedauert, bis es überhaupt geladen wurde. Weitere 15 mins für die Installation und den Neustart. ABER: all das kappt nur, wenn ihr den Akku der Uhr gleich mal brachial quält - die Uhr muss dafür dauerhaft in der Ladeschale sitzen! Und dann? Ist die Uhr fertig. Solange ihr nicht das kürzere Armband gegen das vormontierte lange tauschen wollt. In jedem Fall muss man sich aber mit den Bändern im Klaren sein, bei einem Gedränge ist die Uhr sofort weg. Der Verschluss hält wahrscheinlich noch nicht mal, wenn man selbst eine Jacke anzieht. Noch nicht getestet, aber ich wette, ich verliere sie dann. Und da Google, wie man auch im Store sehen kann, nun glaubt, mit den Bändern ein riesen Business aufzuziehen, kostet der ganze China-Plastik-Schrott ein Vermögen, dass ich nicht bereit bin, auszugeben. Und dann? Machte sich die Ernüchterung breit. Ich trage sonst große Fliegeruhren, eben auch für große Hände. Die Google Watch ist ein Winzling! Einzig das gut beleuchtete Display reißt meine kognitive Dissonanz ein wenig zurück. Aber, Stand jetzt wie zuvor erwähnt, 15.10.2022, schicke ich die Uhr wohl nach ein paar Tagen "Trageprobe" wieder zurück. Trotz eingebautem Lautsprecher und Mikrofon, die den Assistenten und auch richtiges Telefonieren bieten - das Ding hier ist ein Barbie-Spielzeug! Und auch der Sperrmechanismus, PIN oder Muster, zeigt, dass Google von Uhren keine Ahnung hat! Wer den aktiviert, muss bei JEDER Nutzung die PIN eingeben. Pushnachricht? PIN eingeben, lesen und sobald die Uhr sich wieder abgeschaltet hat, muss mit der nächsten Interaktion wieder die PIN eingegeben werden. Sinnvollster Blödsinn! HUAWEI hatte das vor Jahren so gelöst, dass die Abfrage sporadisch kommt. Aber nur, wenn die Uhr mit dem "original" Bluetooth der Einrichtung dauerhaft verbunden ist. Macht ja Sinn, wenn die Uhr am Handgelenk oder in meiner Nähe ist, brauche ich ja wirklich nicht bei jeder Aktion eine PIN-Abfrage. HUAWEI wusste das vor Jahren schon. Google wohl nicht, weil danach nicht so oft gegooglet wurde, was?! Oder weil HUAWEI sich einfach Gedanken gemacht hat... Aber eines muss man der Uhr dann doch lassen: Sie ist wasserfest. Waren es fünf Meter? Oder 50? Ich habe es mir nicht wirklich gemerkt, da Google es wieder besonders detailliert bzw. kompliziert im Store darlegen musste. Mit Strömungsgeschwindigkeit und Wassersäule. Und natürlich kommt gleich die Warnung dazu, dass die Dichte über die Zeit und je nach Wasserrattenleben nachlässt und eben nicht für die Ewigkeit ist. Danke! Und jetzt, wo sie da ist, an meinem Handgelenk, und endlich in Betrieb. Da macht sich Ernüchterung breit. Ein kleines teures Gadget, dass ich nicht gekauft hätte, wenn man es mir nicht zum Handy geschenkt hätte. Und schon gar nicht für 399 Euro ohne oder 429 Euro mit eSIM. Aber ob ich in einer Woche anders denke, könnt ihr dann wahrscheinlich so in drei oder vier Wochen im Blog und Pod hören und lesen. Oder ab, was ich mir gar nicht vorstellen kann, packt mich doch nicht die Begeisterung. Jetzt erst mal sehen, ob sie heute Abend die Dusche überlebt. Und das Händewaschen. Mit Seife! Oder ob das im Jahr 2022 die Dichtigkeit gleich komplett zerstört. Ach, und noch ein Manko: Laut Herstellerangaben hält der Akku maximal, eben abhängig von den individuellen Einstellungen, genau 24 Stunden. Komisch, das haben andere Anbieter, um nicht Mitbewerber zu sagen, doch schon besser und länger hinbekommen. Aber gut, ist ja nur Google, Hardware kann der Laden eben nicht. Mal sehen, wie nervig es ist, die Uhr abends immer zu laden, um ein Schlaftracking auch über die Uhr zu bekommen. Und, noch spannender, ob ich mich auf die Uhr verlassen muss oder ob es auch mit meiner altbekannten Sleep as Android-App klappt. Ihr merkt schon, meine Vorfreude ab Bestellung ist weg. War sie auch schon vor der Lieferung, da Google mir eine Abholung der Ware durch DHL Express bestätigt hat, wohingegen der "Express" zwei Gänge runtergeschaltet hat und erst mal fast fünf Tage noch nicht mal eine Abholung organisiert hat. So hat die Lieferung also über eine Woche gedauert, ich hätte es also zu Fuß in den Niederlanden einsammeln und nach Hause bringen können! Na, mal sehen, was Google noch alles fehlerhaft hinterlassen hat... / Bild-/Quelle: privat Wer freut sich da schon noch auf den Inhalt, erst recht, wenn Fehlermeldungen und schlechte Technik das Inbetriebnehmen versauen und das Gerät an sich auch keinerlei Wow-Effekt mit sich bringt. Oder sich dieser noch unter zu vielen weiteren Fehlermeldungen und Technikversäumnissen verstecken muss - oder er schlichtweg einfach gar nicht da ist? Ich fürchte, die Google Watch hat keinen Wow-Effekt. Und ich orakle euch heute schon: Es wird davon keine Google Watch 2 geben. Aus. Basta. Ende. PodCast abonnieren: | direkt | iTunes | Spotify | Google | amazon | STOLZ PRODUZIERT UND AUFGENOMMEN MIT Ultraschall5 Folge direkt herunterladen

10/11/22 6am CT Hour John, Glen and Sarah chat about the war in Ukraine, Aftermath of Hurricane Ian in Florida and the biggest pumpkin on record. Mark reveals the details on Google's latest toys including Pixel 7, Pixel Watch and Pixel Tablet. Dr. Marquez shares why October is the month of the rosary, it's impact on many life's and why we are encouraged to use this prayer tool today.

On this week's SyrupCast, Patrick O'Rourke, Brad Bennett and Jon Lamont outline all of the rumours surrounding Google's upcoming hardware event, including the Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel Watch and the mysterious tablet the tech giant teased at I/O a few months ago. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

KAUF KEIN GOOGLE PIXEL HANDY!!! LIEBER EIN IPHONE! Na ja, soweit will ich doch nicht gehen, aber hier meine lange Odyssee, mein nagelneues aber defekt geliefertes Google Pixel 6a trotz und wegen Googles "Kundenservice" gegen ein neues getauscht zu bekommen, mit kriminellen Lieferzeiten! Mein Tipp: Kauft NICHTS im Google Store - lieber bei MediaMarkt oder Saturn!!!Ihr kennt ja mein Händchen für Montagsgeräte. Auch mein Freundeskreis greift, im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes, bei wichtigen Anschaffungen im Techniksegment gerne auf mich und meine Anwesenheit zurück. Die Box, die ich aus dem Regal ziehe, wird eisern nicht gekauft, es ist definitiv ein defektes Gerät. Dass dieses Talent nicht nur vor physikalischen Artikel zurückschreckt, sondern auch bei Online-Shops funktioniert, zeigte mir mein Kauf eines Google Pixel 6a im Google Store. Aber glaubt nur nicht, dass Google einen von den Telefondamen selbst als Defekt erkannter Defekt nun zu einem problemlosen Umtausch geführt hätte! Daher, mein Tipp an euch: MAN KAUFT EINEN SCHEIß BEI GOOGLE, SOLLTE ICH DEM PIXELDRECK WEITER TREU BLEIBEN, DANN ÜBER DIE MEDIA-SATURN-ONLINESHOPS - ODER EBEN GLEICH EIN IPHONE! Ein lächerlich weiter Weg über vier Damen, die alle versuchten, mein Schrottgerät bei mir zu lassen - bis ich anfing, Paragrafen und Folgen deutlichst aufzulisten. Drecksladen, dieses Google Store Loch! Seid sicher, da kaufe ich nichts mehr ein! / Bild-/Quelle: privat Ich wollte an sich gar kein neues Handy. Mein altes, ein Google Pixel 4a 5G, welches auch schon einmal getauscht werden musste, war optimal eingerichtet und mit allen Apps, die ich benötigte, versehen. Und ich bekam die schrottige Version der Pixel Buds in neu. Für lau, statt 99 €, die ich umgehend verschenkt habe. Dann bekam ich von Google einen 40 € Gutschein und die Möglichkeit, mein altes Telefon einzusenden und dafür auch Geld zu bekommen. Einzig einschalten sollte es sich lassen und der Bildschirm ohne Schaden sein. Also startete ich zwei verhängnisvolle Fehler: Ich habe am 25.07.2022 ein Google Pixel 6a bestellt und mein Ersatzgerät meines ursprünglichen Kaufs des Pixel 4a 5G eingeschickt. Allein die lange Transportdauer aus den Niederladen in die jämmerlichste Hauptstadt der Länderfinanzausgleichabhängigkeiten hätte mich schon misstrauisch machen sollen. Auch dass Google und dessen jämmerlicher Service mich permanent mit E-Mails bombadierte, wie der Versandstatus des Neugeräts ist und ich parallel dauerhaft aufgefordert wurde, nun endlich mein Althandy einzuschicken, da ich nur noch knapp viereinhalb Wochen Zeit hätte, dies zu tun. Aber auch all dieser Pfusch und die Verzweiflung aus den E-Mails hatte mich damals noch nicht aus der Ruhe gebracht. Was für ein Fehler! Am 28.07. nach 19 Uhr erreichte mich also die DHL-Lieferung. Um die Zeit kümmere ich mich nicht mehr, um technische Geräte, und jeder, der schon mal Murphys Gesetz gelesen hat und die Raum-Zeit-Verzerrungen kennt, zum Thema "schnelle Einrichtung", weiß auch warum. Ich habe euch bereits wissen lassen, wie toll die Einrichtung geklappt hat, schließlich hat Google für nagelneue Geräte nach dem Auspacken bestenfalls Sicherheitsupdates und auch Systemupdates, die Zentimeter-dick mit Staub belegt sind. Und Android13 hat den Tiefschlaf der diversen Fehler des Telefons aufgezeigt - soviel zum unfassbaren Vorteil, beim Hersteller des Betriebssystems die passende Hardware dazuzukaufen: Nach Installation war die eSIM noch da, aber defekt. Ließ sich auch nicht löschen. Oder gegen eine neue ersetzen. Danke auch an den Support, der mir eine Nutzung einer physikalischen Karte empfohlen hat, um den Fehler zu vermeiden. Super! Ein ganz großartiges Genie mit einem Techniksachverstand, der aus einem nicht austherapierten Irrenanstaltenhirn kommen muss. Aber ich ließ nicht locker. Wenn der Typ am Telefon nicht bis drei zählen kann, weil er zwei Finger in der Nase hat, dann eben per E-Mail. Und so startete ich eine E-Mail-Kette mit in Summe vier Google-Mitarbeitern ohne jegliche Berechtigung für irgendwas, außer ans Telefon zu gehen. Ich sollte mein Handy zurücksetzen. Wie. SCHON WIEDER? Google ist auch der einzige, der aufgrund von keiner Nutzung seiner eigenen Produkte den Scheiß aus der Google-Werbung glaubt, dass sich ein Pixel-Telefon auf Basis des Vorgängermodells 1:1 über die Cloud wieder so einrichtet. HA! Dummer, fehlerhafter, amerikanischer Werbescheiß! Aber, der Klügere gibt nach - und am Ende bekomme ich den seit mindestens 10 Jahren nicht mehr gesehenen liegenden Droiden mit rotem Ausrufezeichen im eigenen Schild. Aha, das Gerät ist also Schrott. Gleich mal in die E-Mail-Kette gemeldet. Daraufhin kamen extrem hochtechnische Fragen und Empfehlungen. Das Gerät auszuschalten. Es nochmals auf Werkseinstellungen zu reseten. Es aufzuladen. Nur einen Zero-G-Zustand, den hat man mir nicht vorgeschlagen. Was für ein Glück. Ich kontere und verwies auf mein Verlangen nach Neugerät. Ja, die nächst höhere Instanz muss das entscheiden. Ja, aber bitte auch jemand mit Hirn und technischem Sachverstand. Ich kürze hier mal ab, bevor mein Ausfallen in strafrechtliche Dimensionen auswächst. Nach 24(!!!) E-Mails und drei Telefonaten mit wieder drei unterschiedlichen Ansprechpartnern war es mir endgültig zu blöd, Analphabeten Nachhilfe zum Thema Handy, Technik und Defekte zu geben. Also, aus dem BGB die notwendigen Paragrafen zu fehlerhafter Lieferung, meinem klaren Ausdruck nach Umtausch und die Folgen zwischen Schadenersatz und damit verbundener Rückgabe gemailt. Dann schnallte es auch die dümmste Instanz: ach, Sie wollen ein Eingerät? Nein, ich hätte gerne einen Analdübel mit Hochdruck bei all der Scheiße die ich von euch in den letzten Tagen zu lesen bekommen habe. Man, Dumpfkuh, HER MIT MEINEN SCHEIß ERSATZHANDY! Ich bin leider doch immer noch viel zu höflich - und ja, das Niveau der Antworten wurde nicht besser! / Bild-/Quelle: privat Ich muss sicherlich nicht erwähnen, dass auch die Einsendung des alten Pixels in einem Schneckentempo erfolgt ist, den normalerweise nur die Stadt Berlin mit dem angrenzenden und ebenso kompetenzlosen Brandenburg auf die Kette gebracht hätte... Aber was beide gemein haben, es lag dann nach Eintreffen erst mal gute zwei Wochen rum, bis der Praktikant sich wegen des einen verwaisten Paketes die Mühe gemacht hat, nachzusehen, was es damit auf sich hat. Oh, erste und einzige Rücksendung ever, was, Alter? Immerhin hatte man mein Ersatzhandy für die Auszeichnung der langsamsten Lieferung, seitdem es keine Esel mehr transportieren, angemeldet und wohl nebst Feierlichkeiten den goldenen Langsweiler erhalten - aber es kam dann doch nach einer Woche Versand auch endlich bei mir an. Um nicht schon wieder ein Risiko einzugehen, habe ich es erst mit allen Updates, vor allen, dem wohl doch eher fehlerhaften Beta-Status von Android13, versorgt. Und dann weiter mit einer physikalischen SIM-Karte in Betrieb genommen. Und dann erst die eSim wieder installiert. Somit hat es, vor allem dank der inkompetenten Unterstützung von Google und vier weiblichen Mitarbeiterinnen (DAS ist alltäglicher Genderwahn in Deutschland, btw!) bis zum 30.08.2022 gedauert, ein defektes Gerät trotz sofortiger Reklamation in ein neues, hoffentlich nicht auch mit ausreichend weiter fehlerhafter Hardware, zu ersetzen. Vier Servicemitarbeitende (ich bleibe im Genderwahn, meine Rechtschreibprüfung nimmt sich gleich ihr virtuelles Leben!), die vom 14. bis 30. August mit meinem Schrottgerät hingehalten haben, bis ich das wahre Leben, die Paragrafenwelt, über den Zaun geschmissen habe. Zum Kotzen! Was für ein megabeschissener Service - und meiner Meinung nach, auch mit dem dauernden "Ich muss die nächst höhere Stufe einschalten"-Drecksbullshitquatschscheiß -verarschen kann ich mich selbst noch am besten - pure Absicht und von Google genau so gewollt! Schaut doch, wo ihr mit meiner schlechten und beschissenen sowie von Fehlern und kalten Lötstellen sowie durch schlechte Software obendrauf gebotener Hardware bleibt, aber nervt mich als Google ja nicht mit Problemen! Davon hat der Laden ja eh genug, von DSGVO bis zum nicht fertig werdenden neuen Werbetracking gegen alle Gesetze! Ich habe es schon öfter angekündigt, aber nie war es so wirklich bei 101 Prozent wie diesmal: FINGER WEG VON GOOGLE HARDWARE! Die lächerliche Strategie, den ältesten mit Bildschirm ausgestattet Assistenten auf die neueste Gamma-Version von Fuchsia hochzuziehen, was bis heute nicht passiert ist. Android nun doch Android zu lassen. Fuchsia mehr oder weniger nur noch auf die Chromebooks zu bringen, dann aber unter anderem Namen und mit Linux-Unterbau. Hey, welcher Blindfisch hatte die Idee, ist Linux doch schon heute der Unterbau! Und um es auf den Punkt zu bringen: Strategie hatte der Laden in den letzten Jahren doch sowieso keine mehr. Ich verstehe nur nicht, warum die Aktionäre der Geldverbrennungsmaschinerie in und um Google weiter zusehen? Letzter bedeutender Zukauf für das Kerngeschäft? Machen nur die Konkurrenten, Google schraubt lieber am Quantencomputer. Und sollte der fertig werden und laufen, stellen sie am Folgetag das Projekt ein... soviel Geld lässt sich also mit unseren Daten verdienen, quasi immer noch unreguliert oder dank Sitz auf den (britisch-europäischen) Caymans. Und was ich mit absoluter Sicherheit sagen kann: nach dem Nicht-Service-Erlebnis, dieser Peinlichkeit an Unwissenheit und dummen Phrasen und immer der Verweis auf höhere Ebenen - ich werde, sollte ich doch wieder schwach werden und Hardware wollen, einen Scheiß mehr bei Google kaufen. Habe ich nicht nötig, abgesehen verkacken Dienstleister bei mir, die zu dumm sind, Gesetze zu kennen. Noch döffer ist Google, weil es so tut, als ob es keine Gesetze kennt. Also, scheiß auf den Google Store, auch wenn es mir in der Seele weh tut, dass amazon - was ich verstehen kann - keine Google Hardware im Angebot hat. Aber dafür gibt es die Media-Satur-Holding, meist auch aggressiver oder zumindest mit den identischen Angeboten, die mich auch diesmal haben zuschlagen lassen. Und wenn ich beim MediaMarkt eben nicht die Elektroschrott-Kopfhörer bekomme, so what! Scheiß auf die Teile, die taugen nicht und der Sound einer 30 Euro Version nicht von Google kann mehr und hat besseren Sound! Und Design können mittlerweile alle, da brauche ich diese Design-Schnörkel-Scheiße, die nur von einem "Made in China"-Plastikdreck ablenken soll nicht. Kurz gesagt: Ich bin an der Schwelle, wenn nicht schon mit dem halben Schuh darüber, um Google keine Hardware und vor allem keine Telefone mehr abzukaufen. Dann lebe ich eben wieder mit Android, dass der Hersteller vermurkst, um coole, aber lästige Oberflächen zu haben, die einen vom Wettbewerb differenzieren sollen. Und falls ich doch noch bei den Pixels bleibe, geht die Kohle ab sofort über Media und Saturn über Irland in den Schlund der Steueroasenoptimierer- und DSGVO-Ignoranten Datenkrake. Wir zwei sind fertig, Google - und du allein hast es einfach monsterarschgranatenmäßig verkackt! Und jetzt bin ich gespannt, wie lange es nach dem Blog und Pod dauert, bis mir Google den Account sperrt. Sie führen ja die irrwitzigsten Listen mit Gründen, um Journalisten, Blogger, Podcaster und auch Influencer auf Spur zu halten... also... Los Google, das schüchtern mich nicht ein, es gibt viele und bessere Konkurrenten als dich in ALLEN deinen Geschäftsfeldern - wenn auch nicht so komfortabel, aber problemlos machbar! So, ich habe fertig, wie Flasche leer! PodCast abonnieren: | direkt | iTunes | Spotify | Google | amazon | STOLZ PRODUZIERT UND AUFGENOMMEN MIT Ultraschall5 Folge direkt herunterladen

As a Latina in the C-Suite, Ana Corrales challenges herself to think big and to always contribute. She was an early entrepreneur—selling her handmade scrunchies to her classmates. And although she grew up in a STEM home, she found herself continuing to be interested in sales, so she shadowed a few sales people and realized the field wasn't as easy as she thought. But, that didn't stop her. Ana loves learning. As she describes, she finds a subject that interests her and she just “clicks, clicks, and clicks” online to find more information. Management observing Ana noticed that she could do a lot of things, and so they decided to move her into a management position herself. She has continued to work her way up to her current role as Chief Operating Officer for Google Consumer Hardware. In this role, a few mindsets makes her successful. First, she believes you need to be undeterred when pursuing your goals. Second, you need to be willing to be uncomfortable and do the things other people refuse to do because of fear. Her older sister once told her to consider, “What's the worst that can happen?” She has taken that advice to heart and sometimes just fakes it until she makes it. Finally, Ana describes for us the importance of finding “white space,” which are those quiet moments when you can just allow yourself to think. She believes these moments have made her a better leader. For Ana, gardening gives her these moments. She savors any time she can get away from her devices and has also learned to say no and draw boundaries around her personal time. Ana has learned a lot through all of her experiences, and she shares those insights with us in this podcast. Visit https://www.iambeyondbarriers.com where you will find show notes and links to all the resources in this episode, including the best way to get in touch with Ana. Highlights:  [03:33] Ana's journey [05:54] Gaining clarity through a love of learning [09:54] Making opportunities happen [12:41] Overcoming fear and limiting beliefs [17:57] Creating your own narrative [24:08] Ana's success habits [30:03] Asking for help from your community [32:32] Dreaming big   Quotes: “If you are passionate about what you do and you are contributing and really good, people will come to you and say, ‘Do you want to be part of my team?''” – Ana Corrales “No one shows up looking amazing and totally relaxed all the time. There's a lot of grit and you really need to want it.” - Ana Corrales “Get comfortable with the fact that you're going to be uncomfortable.” - Ana Corrales “If you don't have the narrative out there, there's going to be a narrative about you.” – Ana Corrales About Ana Corrales: Ana Corrales is the Chief Operating Officer for Google's Consumer Hardware business. As COO, Ana leads the development process for Made by Google hardware and Nest products --phones, laptops, Google Home, Chromecast, Nest Thermostat --and manages getting those products into the hands of customers. Ana also drives the end-to-end IT efforts and customer experience work across the Google Hardware business. Ana previously led Google Hardware's first-party retail efforts, including driving the growth of e-commerce channel, Google Store.  Previously, Ana served as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer at Nest. She also served as Senior Vice President of Product Operations at Cisco Systems. In 2006, Ana co-founded a startup solar company. As the acting CEO, Ana sold the company in 2010. Ana serves as a member of the Women@Google board and is an executive sponsor for HOLA, Google's Latino Employee Resource Group. Ana serves on the board of directors for Watermark, the Bay Area's largest women leadership organization, as an advisor to Roli, a company reinventing instruments that extend the joy of music-making to everyone. Ana has been recognized by Forbes as one of the 50 Most Powerful Latinas in Business, and as one of the most powerful Latinas by the Association of Latino Professionals For America (ALPFA). HITEC (Hispanic Information Technology Executive Council) has recognized her as a top technology executive. She is known in the industry as a seasoned leader who can successfully grow startup businesses into multi-billion dollar companies. Ana is a native of Costa Rica and earned a Masters of Engineering from Stanford University. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband and two children. Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anacorrales/ 

Google Hardware, New Google Ads Format, and More Digital Marketing New This Week - May 16, 2022 In this week's episode: Google Testing New Ad Format With Swipeable Images In A Carousel Everything Google announced at I/O 2022 | Mashable YouTube's memberships gifting feature launches Wednesday, but in beta to start - The Verge Biden announces new partnership to expand broadband access - The Verge Here is the new and improved Google Wallet 6 Ways to Boost Customer Satisfaction for Your Online Shop Join us in Web and Beyond Community! It's easy and free. Each week, President of W3 Consulting, Managing Director of W3C Web Services (https://web.w3cinc.com/) and host of Web and Beyond Community (https://www.webandbeyond.community) Ray Sidney-Smith broadcasts live to update you on the latest small business digital marketing and business productivity technology updates you need to be effective. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/webandbeyondlive/message

EP271 - Amazon Q2 2021 Earnings Recap  Jason is back on the road and has some retail store visit reports: Bed Bath & Beyond Flagship in Chelsea Harry Potter Store New York Google New York Neighborhood Goods Starbucks Reserve New York Amazon Q2 2021 Earnings Recap Episode 271 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday July 30, 2021. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 271 being recorded on Thursday July 29th 2021, I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-hosts Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:40] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners, Jason is one of my favorite days of the year and what's exciting is it happens four times a year yep you guessed it Amazon earnings but before we jump into some pretty dramatic earnings this quarter you are coming to us live live live from New York city so it's good that you're out there on the road again and word has it you have some trip reports these are their first trip reports you've been able to give our listeners for last 18 months. Jason: [1:14] Yeah they like this feels like a little bit of normalcy for me is talking to you from a hotel room like I used to do this all the time and I think the first show in 18 months we recorded from a hotel. Scot: [1:28] Nice what's jump into I know you've been on many many store visits let's what's what what are you been seeing. Jason: [1:35] Yeah it was fun I mostly want to focus on stores that had opened for the first time during the pandemic and surprisingly. There are several of those in New York City so I'll start with the one that is closest to my hotel and therefore the first one I went to this morning there's a new flagship Bed Bath & Beyond store that opened in Chelsea. [1:59] And ordinarily folks might say why do we care about a Bed Bath & Beyond store that doesn't sound very interesting and I get it but. The reason it's a little interesting to me is because twofold, they've had a major management and Leadership change at Bed Bath & Beyond they the new CEO is a guy Mark Triton we've talked about a little bit he was responsible for a lot of the new product development at Target before he joined Bed Bath & Beyond, and he announced that he was. [2:31] Doing a dramatic story design and so this Chelsea store is that store and I wanted to check out how he's changed it from what we traditionally think of as a bit Bath and Beyond and it is. Pretty substantial change. Bed Bath & Beyond traditionally is a pretty chaotic treasure hunt so very hard to find your way around people complain that they get lost and can't find an exit the, the lines of sight in a Bed Bath & Beyond or horrific so they stack product to the roof so you can't see very far in any direction in the store. Um and you know it's usually a cluttered mess and so this store. From a visual merchandising standpoint is a much more organized attractive store they it's dramatically more open it has clear lines of sight it has, um like a nice wayfinding system in a visual hierarchy you know it doesn't feel as much like everything's about to fall on top of you or you do it you when you walk in the store so it. [3:36] Visually is more impressive and it's more important it's a more pleasant environment to stand in. Um and so I'll be curious from a pure retail design standpoint I would say it's way better. [3:49] It's pretty off-brand for bed but for what we traditionally have thought of as Bed Bath and Beyond and and because of all those, those sort of clean cleanliness approaches it actually has a fairly significant SKU rationalization so there's fewer skus in the store. And there's probably some Bed Bath & Beyond loyalists that are like you know looking for some of those old products that they no longer have so I'll be curious how the, if they successfully attracts a new Shopper that didn't used to shop Bed Bath and Beyond and whether alienates any of the traditional Bed Bath & Beyond shoppers. Part two of that store is that as he did it Target Mark has launched the first. [4:35] Owned brands for Bed Bath and Beyond and those brands have sort of significant. Prominence in this new store design so so there's I individual vignettes for every one of the Bed Bath and Beyond Brands they're all like, very prominently signed as exclusive to Bed Bath and Beyond and their well executed with attractive. Packaging and visual merchandising that makes them easy to recognize and differentiate so. A bunch of sort of traditional things right that you kind of you know things that are that targets well known for doing well like you're now seeing and Bed Bath & Beyond, um a fear is that people could walk in the store and say wait this is starting to feel like a Target store. Um so we'll see if how that all plays out but I would say if I had one knock on the store. It seems like they've changed the design team but they haven't really changed the store operations team and so, the thing I noticed as well the store was quite well designed and in the product layouts all made sense the store was still starting to feel a bit like a cluttered mess because of the same employees that used to work at the old store are working in this store and their parking shopping carts full of product that they mean to restock on shelves like out in front of things and blocking things and. It just it doesn't seem like they've. [6:00] Um Extended the the new visual merchandising approach to to the Staffing and store operations yet so maybe a work in progress. Scot: [6:10] Well how did they decide from the shopping carts Niles big decluttered it you mentioned they have less cues but did they go to kind of more of like a kiosk kind of a much more clear, kind of Department kind of orientation or how. Jason: [6:26] It's very it's segmented by department and it may not be a fair representation because well, this is a huge store so it made it easier to kind of reconfigure things it's a two-story store so you know you have a home section you have a bedding section you have organization section, um And you know there aren't all these like random nooks and crannies amongst other things I'll bet you shrink as way better in this store than Bed Bath and Beyond because it's super easy for shoplifters to hide and a Bed Bath & Beyond. The end and what they tended to have is like a featured. [7:06] Product display for every department so you know the there's a. Um a sparkling water Cafe sponsored by SodaStream for example. And you know SodaStream was a fast turn product and in bed bath and beyond that here they have a woman working behind a counter, pouring samples of Sodastream and they've launched all these SodaStream launch this new product at Bed Bath & Beyond all these. Branded flavors you can add to the water so IQ can get the bubbly branded flavors and so she's she's sampling different flavors for people they have a coffee bar where they're making you know Keurig copies. Um the other owned products again had their own like featured display where they you know set up a bedroom or a kitchen display that, was was featuring those Bed Bath & Beyond products one of the Bed Bath and bringing Beyond Brands is about green cleanliness and so they you know they have like a cleaning display and stuff like that. [8:14] I would also say they leaned into Mobile in the store and qr-codes more than they have in the past so I all of these feature displays had a big QR code you can scan that took you to a. Sort of a product specific landing page on in their mobile app. In-store pickup was was much more prominent with like a dedicated area for for Bo piss pickups in the front of the store you could do self checkout with scan and go using the mobile app and there was a lot of. Merchandising promoting you to download the mobile app and scan things with your your scan QR codes with your phone. Scot: [8:54] Very cool indeed I know you love QR codes and I think you love more is digital fact tags any exciting digital fact eggs. Jason: [9:01] They did not have any digital fact tags again they are using a lot more QR codes then Bed Bath and Beyond has ever used before and it kind of makes sense because you know, all the restaurants taught everyone how to use qr-codes. During the pandemic and side note I've been getting a lot of complaints from people that the restaurants are not. Give going back to paper menus and I've certainly noticed that here in New York City is that like things are open up they're not requiring people wearing a mask but they still don't have menus and they expect you to order your own food from that app. Um in a QR code on the table so I wonder if that's going to be a permanent thing I've talked to several people that kind of miss the. Paper menus and ordering from a waitress. Scot: [9:47] Cool what a where'd you go after Triple B. Jason: [9:51] So that's in Chelsea and around the corner from this store is the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, in this store opened during the pandemic as well about six weeks ago I actually had a chance to visit the store before it open but this is the first time I got to visit it with people in it. Um And you know this is a super well done themed store we've talked a little bit about it but you know it's the same. Sort of team that that did The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park experience so it's. You know they use they use the actual like tools and dies for props for the movie to make everything they have a. [10:38] A bunch of cool experiences that there's a bunch of personalized products you can get your name engraved on a bunch of stuff you know you can get your own admission letter to Hogwarts, um they have exclusive products like there's a particular version of the the Juan that golden finch one that you can only get from this store so if you're a collector of the ones. There's some product scarcity they have they have food they have a bar essentially for sailing it's selling the. The butterbeer which is from the the movie and is a horrible sweetened alcoholic beverage. There's a non-alcoholic version as well they're in the movies there's a there's a magic candy store so they have a magic candy store. And then in so the merchandising and stuff is really good what's interesting about this store is, that you have to get in a virtual line to get in the store so you you scan a QR code on your phone and that reserve your place in line and then you get texted when you're allowed to come back to the store and go into the store and so I showed up at like. 10:30 scan the qr-code and it said that I was 231 first in line to walk into the store. [12:02] I had to wait for about 45 minutes so that's you know two or three Starbucks for me and then I got to go in the store and. In the store are two virtual reality theme park rides, and sadly I have not gotten an opportunity to try either of those you buy tickets for those online separately from entering the store and, the the tickets sold out for the entire window that they're selling tickets for like the first week that the store opens so so it'll be a few months before you you can get a ticket and do one of these virtual reality rides. Scot: [12:39] So you just there's no motion the Motions all VR or there's like a combo your. Jason: [12:44] My so I don't know my understanding is one of them is a is like a sit-in VR so I do think it has motion but it's like. It's not forward motion it's like the jerkiness I don't know what the right word for that is but it moves a few inches in every direction is my. Understanding and you're looking through a VR headset the other experience you're walking and you wear like a backpack and a VR headset and I'm people say it's amazing I'm curious how that works because. From previous VR experiences you know first time people are not super. Comfortable in the VR environment and like people tend to like fall and stumble and do all kinds of things so I'm. I'm not exactly envisioning how this works so I'll be curious to try it one day. Scot: [13:36] Yeah yeah a lot you'll get nauseous from this viewer thinks do so I'll have to wonder how toned down it'll be. Jason: [13:43] Yeah yeah and I wonder what what cleaning protocol issues. Scot: [13:48] What well since it's magic that can just flick the wand and they're good to go did what house did you get sorted into. Jason: [13:55] Yeah so I didn't visit the Sorting Hat I did you know get my picture taken in Hagrid shoes and in the. It's quite a bit taller than me I'm about as wide as him but that's a separate issue, the the I got my picture taken in the phone booth and I got Steven a griffin door, Jersey and some unlimited Flavor jelly beans. Scot: [14:27] Nice very cool Bertie Botts. Jason: [14:31] Yeah exactly. Scot: [14:33] So you left their half drunk off butterbeer and where'd you go. Jason: [14:39] Exactly so then I went to the Meatpacking District which is just a little south of Chelsea. And my main destination there was that there is a new Google Store for the first time so Google has had pop-up stores and temporary stores in the past but this is their first, permanently open store, and it's open in what still is a Google office but was formerly the Google headquarters in in New York and so it just took like the ground floor of that and turned it into a retail experience. Scot: [15:16] So it's all the just mostly the Google what do they call it the Google home or Google Talk stuff. Jason: [15:22] Yeah it's so mobile so all the the Androids and pixels it's Google home so nest and and the. Google version of Alexa which is I think called Google home and then some some. Like miscellaneous stuff like there some gaming products and some things like that. Scot: [15:47] Cool are they still making Nexus phones haven't seen those in a long time. Jason: [15:52] Yes and I don't I don't think Nexus is them their version is called the pixel so the Google pixel is a Google branded Android phone. Scot: [16:01] They went from Nexus to pixel urgent. Jason: [16:03] Yeah and they might have a tablet that still branded Nexus but I'm not super current on the Google Hardware ecosystem, I would I would say I was a little underwhelmed by the store like it's a perfectly reasonably executed store it frankly doesn't feel any different than their pop-up stores it seems like it has a very consistent, um merchandising approach that doesn't feel like they invent anything new there's no digital fact eggs there's no qr-codes there's very limited product information and it feels more like a showroom than a store so like. There's you know one of everything kind of locked down and you have to talk to a person to get help you can't like. Pick up your own products and pay for them and I bought a few things from the store and they struggled to take my money like they. They all have mobile point-of-sale all the sales associates have mobile point-of-sale systems but like. Didn't seem like they mostly knew how to work them and this is a story that's been open for five weeks and none of them were logged into their point-of-sale terminals so they had to like take it out of their belt and go through like a five-minute like authentication process before they could take my money which, kind of tells you that they're not doing a high volume of selling stuff out of the store. Scot: [17:18] Did you try to pay with Apple pay. Jason: [17:20] I did in fact I didn't try I succeed. Scot: [17:23] Whoa really. Jason: [17:24] Yeah the in so I literally like looked at and then I might can I pay with Apple pay and then he like looked at me and said you mean NFC payment sure. [17:39] Yeah so that did work eventually once I found someone that had was logged into their point-of-sale terminal I would say the best part of this store, was that they had several vignettes in separate little rooms that were kind of great retail theater that was kind of telling the story of a particular genre of Google products so like I said down on a couch. In a in a little room that's you know kind of designed to look like a small house. And they teach you about all the Google Home Products so so they have like a projector that projects text down on the coffee table in front of you and they come up with all these scenarios like in the window, you see the silhouette of a UPS delivery driver come up and you hear someone knock on the door and then the table says you know teaches you how to use Google home to look at the front door camera. And so you can see the UPS driver and an approved the package and then, a woman in the background answer of your cooking lunch and the table teaches you how to use Google home to find a recipe to cook and you know the table teaches you how to pick some music to listen to and how to turn up the lights and run a good night routine to get ready for bed stuff like that so it was nice retail theater you know I can only serve one group group at a time and so again it feels like. [19:00] You know exactly what it is the stores you know mostly focus on sort of being a. In education showroom for for these Google Technologies more than like a high-volume retail. Scot: [19:14] Colts after being quote unquote that guy that had to pay with Apple pay at the Goodwill store where where did you go next. Jason: [19:21] I think they were just thrilled I was bad guy that paid for something, but yeah so then to other stores that are kind of kitty corner from the the Google store that I had been to before but like I really only opened just before the pandemic so I wanted to check them out again while I was there. The there's a neighborhood good store so we've talked about neighborhoods this is like one of these um d2c department store Concepts where it's like a shared retail space and Brands rent rent. Space primarily like DDC Challenger Brands rent space inside of this this department store so there's a bunch of vignettes in the store we visited one in Texas I think you were with me. And so this is a the Manhattan one and you know as I've discussed before like this it's reasonably well executed I actually think neighborhood Goods does. The best job amongst the companies that do this but I'm I'm not super bullish on the concept. Because it's the big problem is it's kind of a chaotic hodgepodge of Assortment like there isn't a merchant saying customers are coming to our store to solve problem X and so I'm going to have these products that solve that problem, so it's kind of a. [20:42] You have to go to the store you know willing to be completely surprised by what they have in the store right and it might be beauty products it might be a parallel in might be Beach where you know you couldn't go there with any specific need and have any confidence that, that there was going to be a product that match that need their but I would say. Neighborhood Goods feels a little more curated and a little more focused than with a point of view than some of these others. [21:10] And then I visited the the most important retailer in Manhattan which is the Starbucks Reserve store so, they're this is there's a small Fleet of Starbucks stores that are called the Starbucks Reserve stores they all have working, Coffee Roasters in them and have you buy the premium beings from any Starbucks anywhere in the world that come in the black bags they're getting roasted on premises in the stores, these doors all have like alcohol and unique coffee bars, in a bunch of drinks that you can't get in a regular store and they usually have some like third-party restaurants in the stores and their huge extravagant beautiful architecture. Um stores so the largest coffee shop in the world is a Starbucks Roastery in mine in my city in Chicago the first one of these was in Seattle which is home of Starbucks, the only other one in the u.s. is this Manhattan one in flat iron which is. Um well we execution but I would say nothing that I haven't seen in one of the other. Starbucks reserves and then there now is like a Starbucks Reserve in Shanghai and a Starbucks Reserve most controversial of all in one of the cities in Italy. [22:28] And I say controversially because the Italians like their coffee and don't necessarily appreciate the American coffee brand so it was kind of a bold move on Starbucks part to open this. Ginormous Coffee Emporium in in Italy. Scot: [22:42] Read teach them how real coffee is made. Jason: [22:45] Exactly my favorite feature of the Starbucks Reserve stores is I mentioned they wrote their own beans in the store and then they have these fancy coffee bars. So what they've done is they they have a Willy Wonka style vacuum tube or a series of tubes, so to me it's a metaphor for the internet that runs from the the Roasterie to the coffee bar and so the you literally like if you're there when they're roasting can watch beans. Flow through these tubes straight from where they've been roasted to the bar where they get ground into coffee drinks. Yeah yeah it's very very Willy wonka-esque and again the startx folks do a great job of visual merchandising, this kind of reminds me of the first time I walked into a Nike Town and it was kind of this like. Temple to the Nike brand and they did all these things that back then were not common like they you know design the door handles of the store to be swooshes and all these cool little touches, and in many ways this these Starbucks stores feel like the modern successor to that. Scot: [23:58] I noticed you didn't mention one of our favorite stores beta and that made me think about one of the big buzzes before the pandemic was that Hudson yards event is that right yeah is that what's going on with with those guys. Jason: [24:12] Um well so I don't have super first-hand information Hudson yard is still open a giant floor of Hudson yard was a Neiman Marcus the fanciest Neiman Marcus and that is out of business. Um I don't think they have another tenant for that yet but I didn't go to Hudson yard and this visit it's actually in this area so it would have been. [24:34] Possible to walk too but I just didn't have time and that Hudson yard does have a beta. You know I think beta struggled a little bit in the pandemic they kind of were optimized to be pandemic unfriendly like most of their stores are in malls like heads in yard that had. Significant decline in trout in traffic, and they're kind of the opposite of Essentials right like so there they have a very curated point of view their Consumer Electronic gadgets but again you wouldn't go there because you need a Bluetooth headset like you'd go there to find some new. [25:10] New Gadget that you didn't know existed that you wanted and I think that kind of shopping you know was particularly impacted by the pandemic like you tended only go to the store when you really needed something so, um you know I think some of the founders of beta including bib who's been on our show I think at least once, we're kind of public during the pandemic about some of the the challenges they were having trying to take care of their employees and you know stay open and generate Revenue, and I would say you know one thing that I've been a little critical of beta I think they do a bunch of things very well they've always been slow to embrace omni-channel in the web so they really focus on the in-store experience and I've been kind of critical that they don't have a, equivalent online experience and I have a feeling that that that deficiency probably you know was extra painful during the pandemic so hopefully they're starting to recover now. Scot: [26:05] Yeah yeah hope they make it too because this one of my favorite favorite gadgety places to go. Jason: [26:09] Yeah I have to be honest because I also I didn't even mention it because they're so boring but I bounced into the Flatiron Apple Store, and it like it dawned on me how fun I used to think it was to walk into a text or or a computer store or even a Best Buy because you would always discover something you didn't know existed that you wanted. And that doesn't happen anymore like there's there's very few sores that surprise and Delight you with their product assortment like you know because of the. The you know all the digital pre-shopping like you're way more likely to know about all the cool products from from the web before ever before you'd ever you know stumbled across it in the store and in the case of Apple. There you know rationalizing their inventory to exclusively Apple products so they just have less interesting accessories and you know lesser-known things than they've ever had before. Scot: [27:06] That sounds like a busy day you're missed. Jason: [27:10] Yeah yeah I'm a little tired and then of course I had to spend about eight hours deep diving into the Amazon earnings. Scot: [27:17] Yeah that's a good set of well thanks for doing those trip reports for so no enjoy hearing hearing your exploits as you're out there and hopefully you can keep exploring this Delta variant won't shut you down so let's jump into the Amazon quarter. [27:45] So Amazon released calendar Q2 results and I'd say it was the toughest Amazon quarter and quite a while so, you know the headline here is in Wall Street vernacular companies put out their own projections and then Wall Street Khan does their own math and which is called consensus a lot of times based on the history of how the company does Wall Street will either go above kind of what the company says or below it or whatnot and I would qualify and when you when you exceed wall Street's expectations that's called a beat and then when you then Wall Street always looking out it's a what have you done for me lately or in the future coming so then they're always thinking about you know what's going on in Q3 and they already have consensus for that so you either beat or miss the current quarter and then raise neutral or lower than forward quarter or the years Viewpoint and this is this is kind of the the worst scenario here is it was a myth so they missed wall Street's Revenue expectations and then they lowered Revenue expectations going forward so so that's no good and we'll dig into what happened there and then the Silver Lining here though is the in this part is really isolated to the on What's called the segment called online store which is effectively the e-commerce part of the business which was Amazon obviously is pretty big and important. [29:13] But they actually exceeded expectations on the high margin parts of the business that everyone really values even more than when you see the sum of the parts kind of things so things like the advertising piece we talked about AWS and some of the other the third party Marketplace they actually exceeded expectations on those side so if there's a silver lining it's that they kind of you know the e-commerce year-over-year comparisons were really tough and we'll go into why but then the other non e-commerce parts of the business did really well also as a reminder this is the first quarter where Jeff Jesse is taking over to the new CEOs taking over so the timing. [29:56] Yeah sorry yes I do Andy Andy Jesse is taking her so, you know the timing is tough for him because he gets to kind of reside over you know what feels like a long time since the company has missed a quarter but in a way, you know it's a chance it's kind of what a lot of Wall Street people are also called kitchen sink quarter so you kind of like if you're going to have a little bit of a rough quarter you might as well sweep everything into this quarter lower expectations and that resets the bar hopefully so that you can then start to get back to exceeding that those expectations so a lot of folks were kind of saying yeah. Projection didn't felt pretty aggressively low compared to the quarter so a lot of people were kind of framing it as maybe that's what's going on there. Jason: [30:44] Yeah it's interesting I listen to the the webcast. Where you know reporters and analysts get to call in and ask questions and you know one of the questions was kind of critical asking like what they what they missed in terms of pandemic trends that that adversely affected in this quarter and and I don't remember who the Amazon employee was that answered but he's like we've been pretty consistently bad at predicting the impact of the pandemic he's like you know in the in the good quarters we wildly underestimated what would happen and you know this quarter we over it we underestimated the the counter Trends and so you know he's like. At least we've been consistent in being being wrong. Scot: [31:33] Yeah it is hard to predict even now you know it's hard to predict what the second half of this year is going to look like right you can you know the data the immediate data is telling you everything is like on fire in but then you know this Delta variant you know there's always talk so shutdowns and stuff again so the cone of uncertainty is quite large right now for everybody. Jason: [31:55] Yeah and go ahead I was just going to say I had I almost wonder if. Amazon like is taking a little extra hit for being one of the earlier Q2 earnings calls. Because I feel like everyone is going to have a kitchen sink quarter it's going to be super complicated and they're going to be ups and downs. You know for a for a lot of retailers and I think you know the analysts are kind of learning about the factors through these first couple earnings calls but you know the, the Amazon quarter may not look as bad you know once once we get through the whole learning seen each season and see how everyone shook out. Scot: [32:35] Yeah I think what we'll do is we'll kind of track this through the next couple weeks and and maybe it actually won't look bad in hindsight but kind of been one of the first ones to report the only one that I saw that came out earlier was Shopify and they had a pretty rip-roarin quarter they exceeded that was a beat and exceed so so you know it's kind of kind of weird of the mix of what's going on here and, I can't hundred percent parse out like why would Shopify do better than Amazon and you know why would smbs do better than big old Amazon so maybe maybe it's just a comp thing you ever your butt will dig into that for listeners. Jason: [33:15] Sad no my hypothesis on Shopify would be that the pandemic taught a lot of small businesses that they needed a website and, ideally if they were in one of these categories where they were Outsourcing digital to Door – or instacart or you know my web grocer or someone else, that they started thinking about needing their own website and if they were you know mainly selling through marketplaces and then you know Amazon throttled FBA, like they suddenly realized they needed their own direct sales and so I do think. There are a bunch of the pandemic trends that would particularly cause small business this is to invest in their own website for the first time and so that that could have could mean that a bunch of, customers on boarded onto Shopify which kind of helped Goose their number. Scot: [34:08] Yeah they don't break out new net new. Jason: [34:11] No no I wish they did because that again like they had a huge GMB growth but the problem is we never know if that's because the stores that have been using Shopify for a while doubled in size or because they doubled the amount of stores they host. Scot: [34:25] Let's dig into the Amazon numbers to kind of give the context is kind of one of the early results here and then then we'll follow up with some more details so overall sales increased 24% taking out the effect of currency and variations for the quarter 213 billion for the second quarter that is the slowest growth since 2019 and that's when I stopped looking back so you know Amazon's been growing much much faster than 24% for quite a while here so this was a very slow quarter which is kind of funny because pre-pandemic e-commerce is growing 15% so so it's all relative I guess but slow for Amazon. [35:08] Actually above Baseline for normal e-commerce I would say this cause them to miss the consensus so the number they came out with his 113 consensus was 115 and change and then Amazon they did kind of come within their own guidance but at kind of the midpoint and whereas for the last six plus quarters they've come in at the higher beat their own guidance and then another thing you know if as you think about these moving parts Q 221 had prime day and last year it was in Q4 of 20 so we should have had the benefit of prime day but then you know obviously, Q 220 covid-19 at its peak in Amazon was was going to be benefiting from that Surge and all the PPE stuff they were pushing out and Essentials and all that and then obviously we don't have that this year so lots of moving Parts going on and then Amazon does peel the onion a little bit with the segments and want you walk us through that. Jason: [36:13] Yeah happy to so the big segments that the Amazon discloses are North America international and AWS, so North America in Q2 of, 20/20 had grown 43 percent. Tends to be growing a little slower than International it's the biggest piece of the business I want to say it so I 62 percent of the business, and so this this Q2 it only grew by 22 percent so the rate of growth substantially slowed down. Um The you know a couple of the things we try to zero in on in that are the online sales and the brick-and-mortar sales so the online stores grew by 13 percent which again is, the slowest rate of growth for North America online stores in at Amazon that I can find in history. [37:19] So so that that's a pretty significant deceleration and you know pre-pandemic we used to talk about e-commerce growing about 12% a year, and Amazon was typically their store their online store sales North American Sales were growing in though I Thirty to forty percent a year so, um it we won't know yet the Department of Commerce data on e-commerce won't come out for Q2 until August, but it's very possible that this will be the first time in a very long time that Amazon's growth in e-commerce was slower than the industry average I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that that's not going to be true. The industry average is going to slow down as well but like you know they're those numbers are flirting with each other and usually Amazon as well above the the industry average. [38:10] Um and then also interesting and quite complicated is physical stores So Physical stores had a rebound they were up 10% Q2 of this year versus Q2 of last year, and you know. Previous quarters had been going down quite a bit so Q2 of last year was down 13 percent from the previous year so. [38:35] The the thing then think about here is physical stores that Amazon mostly means Whole Foods so that they have about 15 on Hall food stores or maybe 70 now, but most of the revenue is Whole Food stores and there's a quirk where when someone buys an online delivery order from Whole Foods. Amazon online sales gets the credit instead of Whole Foods so so for a long time the stores their number has been declining and and the hypothesis has been that's because. [39:10] More people are learning how to shop online and that makes the, the people that are buying from the cash registers at Whole Foods look smaller and so this was the first quarter in a long time that Whole Foods had a net growth, which is interesting because that's grocery is not necessarily one of the categories that you would you know. Grocery had a huge quarter during the pandemic and so you would you would expect not to see real Healthy Growth in grocery stores this year comping against the pandemic quarter from last year so, I found that interesting so then the next category is international it was a little more, robust versus usual it was up 26%. Which I guess I misspoke because that's that's actually a lot slower than usual. [40:09] So so that also was kind of a downer and then AWS, um what what Drew quite robust so it was up 37 percent versus for example being up 29% the same quarter last year. So so the rate of growth of AWS accelerated and you know the funny thing is how this plays out because of these diverse businesses Amazon has and the fact that, you know a WS and some of the other businesses are so margin favorable when, you know retail is the biggest piece of their gross sales so so when retailgeek us down there grow sales go down but their profitability goes up basically. And conversely if retail has a gang Buster quarter likely is going to have a negative impact on their on their margins so. So you know there's always happy and unhappy news and in a company as complex's Amazon these days. Scot: [41:07] Yeah the International Center success scanning the results on a psycho 36 percent that's good but then it was like X FX was 26 percent so 10 points you know which is a pretty material chunk of that growth was due to currency so that was interesting the dollar must have been strong a year ago and then quite weak now to have moved ten percent against the basket of currencies they're measuring against. Jason: [41:32] Yeah in the press conference the CFO called out that this is like one of the, most complicated highest fluctuations of the international currencies and so he was he you know he was trying to exclusively talk about, the the normalized numbers because he's like you know this was a very unusual quarter from the currency standpoint. Scot: [41:53] Yes I've done this having operated. On the international side it's super frustrating because you're like oh man we had a great quarter and then you get the results of the taking out the currency then like knocks like half of the work in there and you're kind of like that's not fair I'd have no control over that but it is what it is. Jason: [42:12] Indeed and it is part of the cost of doing business on that scale unfortunately so a couple of things kind of Sub sub numbers within those numbers that were interesting. You know increasingly Amazon makes a lot of money selling services to the third-party Sellers and so the 3rd party seller Services number grew quite robustly that group 34 percent, that's a nice high margin business and I think the third-party Sellers as a percentage of total sales hit a new high mark, 422 they were 56 percent of all sales so I that's the highest number I remember because I want to say was 54% last quarter which was at the time the highest number. Scot: [42:57] Yeah that's interesting it's been for longest time it was just a fifty percent for years and years and then it seems to be on a bit of a take off right now just which is interesting I wonder if it's. Conspiracy theorists would say hmm I wonder if this is a way of further insulating themselves from scrutiny from from any Trust. Jason: [43:18] Yeah and then when number that I was curious to get your take on so subscription Services were up for 28%. And the thing that's interesting to me about that is I have always assumed that the bulk of subscription Services is prime. Um and I actually think there's some data points from outside of the earnings call that point to the. The growth rate of Prime members slowing substantially for Amazon so I think you know there were a bunch of forecast that that, you know they may have only added to % Nu Prime members on Prime Day last year which. You know the there over half of all the households in America are prime numbers so they're kind of is the law of large numbers kicking in here but you know they used to get. Very robust double-digit growth in Prime members just from Prime day and it felt like those things are slowing down so I was surprised to see subscription services so high do you have a. A take on why that might have been. Scot: [44:19] Yeah so let's see so we had to Prime days in the last under a year so we had October and then June, most people would be in there free window isn't there free window of prime still we get 30 days free. Yes I don't think June would have really moved the number so it must be residual from. Q4 now that does show up they'll kind of start in q1 I don't know that that's interesting I do I have read reports that there you know some of the international Prime was kind of slow to take off and they've tweaked the offerings in some of the countries like the UK has been popular but other parts of Europe like maybe Italy and Spain has been a little sluggish and then I think they've tweaked the offering and then India I think they've been doing a big push there if I recall so so maybe again it's kind of it'll break unfortunately don't break down that that piece by North American International like the other pieces we can kind of see my bet would be us as slow and maybe a lot of it came from. Jason: [45:24] No that's a great point I wasn't I wasn't thinking about that but you're probably exactly right in a reminder for listeners the prime offering in a lot of other countries is, significantly different than the North American offering the North American offerings the most robust so there's a lot of things, that you get in that North American offering that they're they you know they're not doing same-day delivery and every Market they're not doing Prime Video in all 22 markets where they offer Prime so. It said that the the offering is more compelling some places than others. [45:56] Um and then the most important number of all Scott you know the number I always focus on is the super descriptive other Revenue, and so as a reminder other Revenue we think in Amazon's case is mostly their advertising Revenue in this this has been a rapidly growing number of for them every quarter and it was rapidly growing again, it had 83 percent growth to you know just under eight billion dollars for the quarter I did some quick math and I think my math ended up being slightly different than you so I wonder if I did. Not trying to see adjusted and you did currency adjusted or something like that, but I think the Run rate at the last four quarters for other is now 28 billion. So that they are they are like the clear number three advertising Network in the US and they are they're rapidly gaining on Google and Facebook. Scot: [46:56] I think the trailing 12 would be that number and then I think the Run rate would be about eight times four which would be 32 would be the run right yeah. Jason: [47:05] Fair enough yes yeah although I don't think that's completely even so yeah. Scot: [47:10] Yeah that assumes that they're going to at least do that as well as they did this quarter 24 now this this is one of the things that would have had a in the quarter bump from Prime day yeah and I I heard anecdotally you probably have a better kind of quantitative data on this that this Prime day people get like really Knives Out fighting for customers and spinning out a ton on ad dollars as did you hear, some similar stuff. Jason: [47:36] Yeah and I think like every other advertising platform out of the world in the world like that Amazon is getting better and better about optimizing, the pricing for Prime which means that it is less profitable for the advertisers right because they're getting as much as they possibly can so the kind of the the return on ad spend is going down as the revenue to Amazon is is going up, um and increasingly like there is no visibility for your deals on Prime day like unless you support them with ads. So in the same way like no one's going to see your organic content on Facebook if you don't buy an ad you know nobody is going to see your product listings on on Amazon without add support. Scot: [48:26] Yep pretty amazing how fast they made that go from a hey if you want a little bit extra traffic do this now it's like hey if you want to sell anything you better run some ads. Jason: [48:36] Yeah it's the bane of my existence because every retailer is trying to recreate that you know on a smaller scale and. It creates all kinds of complications as a brand it's really hard right now because you're getting extorted for retail advertising dollars from all these retailers there are many cases don't have the reach to justify the money they're asking for but in some cases you can't say no because they're your wholesale partner is going to kick you out of the store if you don't give him the money so it's interesting. Scot: [49:06] Of course those were the segments and then so I would say well she was kind of looking at that like kind of a mixed bag you know we wish they had at least meet expectations there but it's nice that the high-margin things kind of beat our expectations and then the guidance came out and that's kind of like where it was like a this is this does not look good so what happened here is a guided to 106 to a hundred and twelve billion so at the midpoint it's 109 that is 13 percent year-over-year growth consensus was at 119 so they're off by kind of 10 billion there they, lowered the expectation by 10 billion and then during the Q2 results we didn't go into it in super detail but the they missed the Top Line because those high margin businesses exceeded the overall profitability of the business was decent right so it wasn't wasn't terrible. [49:58] But here they've now lowered the bottom line to pretty considerably below expectations and then that brings down the whole year so you know I looked after hours the stock was down 8% I think it'll be a little bit of a bloodbath tomorrow as everyone kind of like real lions towards you know this well what is it is a 13% grower I don't think anyone had modeled out 13 percent growth for Amazon this year so so that will be a little bit of a blood bath and a resetting them expectations which I think again if I'm the new CEO this is might as well go ahead and do it now and and then hopefully he can kind of like use that Foundation to start beating exceeding expectations but that was that was kind of the ugliest part I think that really kind of you know everyone's kind of mix quarter you know hopefully the guidance will be kind of you know not really impacted and it was kind of like a little bit of a shock at the end there about how low they did Diamond Stone. Jason: [50:58] Yeah yeah and again Amazon was one of the very first retailers to report their Q2 numbers and so I think it is going to be super interesting to follow the rest of the earnings. And see where the rest of retail lands. You know and whether they're adjusting their guidance for the end of the year because pretty good point that this fear of uncertainty is huge. And you know nobody knows like are we going to be back in the pandemic behaviors in Q3 and Q4 as variance get worse are, you know is they're going to be spending their money on weddings and vacations that you know had been deferred and instead of in retail like how does the. The you know tweaks in government stimulus and the childcare credits and all those things impact spending like there's just so many factors. It's really complicated and it's going to be interesting to see how those all net out for the Walmarts and targets and Best Buys of the world. Scot: [51:55] Yeah and you know for listeners we're going to this is kind of one one data point and we're going to keep track of other retailers as they report and kind of sort through it for you so we can figure out what's going on in the data and you know here in retail Land by the time July rolls around and we had in August we're all thinking about the fourth quarter so what we're trying to do is parse these tea leaves and see if we can help you think through any strategies for the fourth quarter so that's going to be where we'll start to lay down some content here in the next several episodes. Jason: [52:26] Yeah now a number of listeners asked me to ask you like because Amazon had such a soft quarter it's presumably going to affect the stock is that going to slow down your plans to buy a ticket on Virgin Galactic at all or. Scot: [52:39] I have no desire to go to space so I'm more than happy to watch the billionaires do their thing and you know and I'm glad they're not spending my tax dollars so I'm all good with what they're up to. Jason: [52:53] Fair enough I think the listeners will be thrilled to know that you're staying safe. Scot: [52:58] Doing my best. Jason: [53:01] Awesome well I think that wraps up this this quick take on Amazon earnings as always if this was valuable to you we sure would appreciate that five star review on iTunes. Scot: [53:16] Thanks everyone for joining us and… Jason: [53:19] Until next time happy Commercing.

Albert Einstein once said, “Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with big dreams is more powerful than one with all the facts.” He went on to say, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” Now, we all know the tremendous impact Einstein made by pursuing big dreams. So, it stands to reason that boundless curiosity fuels discovery which ultimately leads to big dreams. Meet Ana Corrales, Chief Operating Officer for Google's Consumer Hardware business, who shares her career journey and how curiosity helped her to gain clarity and led her to the perfect role. As COO, Ana leads the development process for Made by Google hardware and Nest products --phones, laptops, Google Home, Chromecast, Nest Thermostat --and manages getting those products into the hands of customers. She also drives the end-to-end IT efforts and customer experience work across the Google Hardware business. Ana previously led Google Hardware's first-party retail efforts, including driving the growth of e-commerce channel, Google Store. Ana has been recognized by Forbes as one of the 50 Most Powerful Latinas in Business, and as one of the most powerful Latinas by the Association of Latino Professionals For America (ALPFA). HITEC (Hispanic Information Technology Executive Council) has recognized her as a top technology executive. She is known in the industry as a seasoned leader who can successfully grow startup businesses into multi-billion dollar companies. In this episode, Ana shares how mentors helped her unleash her curiosity and to dream bigger and pursue audacious goals. She also shares insights on making opportunities happen, overcoming fear and limiting beliefs, the importance of creating your own narrative, and challenges listeners to ask themselves, “Are dreams are really big enough?”. Visit https://www.iambeyondbarriers.com where you will find show notes and links to all the resources in this episode, including the best way to get in touch with Ana.   Highlights: [03:33] Ana's journey [05:54] Gaining clarity through a love of learning [09:54] Making opportunities happen [12:41] Overcoming fear and limiting beliefs [17:57] Creating your own narrative [24:08] Ana's success habits [30:03] Asking for help from your community [32:32] Dreaming big   Quotes: “Continuous learning is important and you will go further faster if you are deliberate in your learning.” – Ana Corrales “Don't let your calendar manage your time .” - Ana Corrales “Success is not a linear journey.” - Ana Corrales “If every day goes perfectly well for you, you are likely not challenging yourself.” – Ana Corrales  “Be genuine and intentional in sharing your story lest others tell it for you.” – Ana Corrales   About Ana Corrales: Ana Corrales is the Chief Operating Officer for Google's Consumer Hardware business. As COO, Ana leads the development process for Made by Google hardware and Nest products --phones, laptops, Google Home, Chromecast, Nest Thermostat --and manages getting those products into the hands of customers. Ana also drives the end-to-end IT efforts and customer experience work across the Google Hardware business. Ana previously led Google Hardware's first-party retail efforts, including driving the growth of e-commerce channel, Google Store. Previously, Ana served as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer at Nest. She also served as Senior Vice President of Product Operations at Cisco Systems. In 2006, Ana co-founded a startup solar company. As the acting CEO, Ana sold the company in 2010. Ana serves as a member of the Women@Google board and is an executive sponsor for HOLA, Google's Latino Employee Resource Group. Ana serves on the board of directors for Watermark, the Bay Area's largest women leadership organization, as an advisor to Roli, a company reinventing instruments that extend the joy of music-making to everyone. Ana has been recognized by Forbes as one of the 50 Most Powerful Latinas in Business, and as one of the most powerful Latinas by the Association of Latino Professionals For America (ALPFA). HITEC (Hispanic Information Technology Executive Council) has recognized her as a top technology executive. She is known in the industry as a seasoned leader who can successfully grow startup businesses into multi-billion dollar companies. Ana is a native of Costa Rica and earned a Masters of Engineering from Stanford University. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband and two children. Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anacorrales/  

One of my favorite guests to date, Tia Fowlkes joins the podcast to share how she navigates bringing her authentic self to every space she occupies. Tia is a recent Computer Science graduate of Michigan State University. While her minor was in business, she entered the tech industry to explore her passion for customer satisfaction and fostering a culture of diversity & inclusion. Tia joined Google in February 2021 as program manager for the Beta Testing team within Google Hardware. As a Detroit native, she spends her free time making websites, sewing, and raising her french bulldog, Zeus! Tia is also a freelance website designer who helps students and professionals improve their resumé by transferring it to their personal website. She also helps small businesses that are looking to establish their website before an upcoming launch. You can receive a free consultation at www.tialeefowlkes.com.

Dhane Scotti, Head of Global Consumer Marketing for Google Hardware, knew from a very early age that he wanted to make commercials but he still felt like a fish out of water when he entered the advertising industry. So he decided early in his career that he had to leverage his sense of culture and uniqueness to have a seat at the table. His story is purely fascinating with so many lessons shared and inspirational experiences for anyone looking to create their own choose your own adventure story. Listen to learn how he combines his east coast upbringing with his southern coming of age.Episode References:- Nas Illmatic - https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/the-juice/6062505/nas-illmatic-at-20-classic-track-by-track-review - Kel Mitchell (Dhane's doppelgänger) - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005239/bio 3 Stories Dhane would want to hear:1) Harriet Tubman - https://www.biography.com/activist/harriet-tubman 2) Mike Tyson - https://www.biography.com/athlete/mike-tyson 3) Winston Churchill - https://www.biography.com/political-figure/winston-churchill You can connect with Dhane at:LI - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhanescotti/ IG - https://www.instagram.com/greatdhane/

Tune in to learn about the benefits of Google Hardware, specifically Pixel 4a, Pixel 4 with 5G, and Pixel 5 phones, and how SYNNEX can help with your Google Hardware needs.

Broken News Pixel 4a launches in India - How does it stack up against the OnePlus Nord Apple iPhone event on Oct 13 - What to expect Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition - Checkmate for Pixel 5? Feature: Google hardware event Pixel 5 Pixel 4a 5G Nest audio Chromecast with Google TV _____________________ Follow Vikram on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TheVikramMohan Visit 4spire.net to listen and subscribe to this and other podcasts. Follow 4spire on Twitter at @4spirepodcasts and on Facebook at facebook.com/4spirepodcasts --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wug/message

Google's new hardware has dominated our site, YouTube channel and podcast for a few weeks now. We had preliminary leaks of the new gadgets followed by a virtual event and now we have the actual hardware in our hands here at the Chrome Unboxed office. If you missed them, we have unboxing videos of both the new Chromecast with Google TV and the new Nest Audio speaker and both items have impressed thus far. Our podcast this week ends up being an at-length look at these two new pieces of affordable, effective hardware. At $49, the new Chromecast is a no-brainer in the media streaming game and the $99 Nest Audio becomes an easy-to-recommend, full-bodied speaker that won't hurt your bank account too badly. After having both around and using them for a bit already, we obviously have some thoughts and are excited to share them with our listeners. NOTABLE LINKS The new Chromecast with Google TV will be pretty awesome for gaming, just not yet One night in a hotel completely sold me on the new Chromecast with Google TV Nest Audio unboxing and initial impressions [VIDEO] Chromecast with Google TV unboxing and initial hands-on [VIDEO] Google's all-new Nest Audio is available today, here's where you can pick one up --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/chromeunboxed/support

Chromecast With Google TV, Nest Audio, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a 5G Walking through every device from Google's Fall event. Pixel 5 is less than premium, but good enough. Pixel 4a XL is the goldilocks device of the lineup. Chromecast with Google TV is appealing but lacks Stadia support. Nest Audio is the first major Google Home update in four years. Bringing Google TV to Android TV devices is possible. Android 11 kills Daydream once and for all. ASUS unveils the ROG Phone 3 for gamers and spec mongers. RCS is rolling out in New Zealand. Does the unlocked Pixel 5 work on Verizon? What is the true IP rating of the Pixel 5? Read our show notes here: https://bit.ly/3iCiAdX Hosts: Jason Howell, Florence Ion, and Ron Richards Guest: Brandon Lee Subscribe to All About Android at https://twit.tv/shows/all-about-android. Sponsor: ZipRecruiter.com/android

Chromecast With Google TV, Nest Audio, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a 5G Walking through every device from Google's Fall event. Pixel 5 is less than premium, but good enough. Pixel 4a XL is the goldilocks device of the lineup. Chromecast with Google TV is appealing but lacks Stadia support. Nest Audio is the first major Google Home update in four years. Bringing Google TV to Android TV devices is possible. Android 11 kills Daydream once and for all. ASUS unveils the ROG Phone 3 for gamers and spec mongers. RCS is rolling out in New Zealand. Does the unlocked Pixel 5 work on Verizon? What is the true IP rating of the Pixel 5? Read our show notes here: https://bit.ly/3iCiAdX Hosts: Jason Howell, Florence Ion, and Ron Richards Guest: Brandon Lee Subscribe to All About Android at https://twit.tv/shows/all-about-android. Sponsor: ZipRecruiter.com/android

Chromecast With Google TV, Nest Audio, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a 5G Walking through every device from Google's Fall event. Pixel 5 is less than premium, but good enough. Pixel 4a XL is the goldilocks device of the lineup. Chromecast with Google TV is appealing but lacks Stadia support. Nest Audio is the first major Google Home update in four years. Bringing Google TV to Android TV devices is possible. Android 11 kills Daydream once and for all. ASUS unveils the ROG Phone 3 for gamers and spec mongers. RCS is rolling out in New Zealand. Does the unlocked Pixel 5 work on Verizon? What is the true IP rating of the Pixel 5? Read our show notes here: https://bit.ly/3iCiAdX Hosts: Jason Howell, Florence Ion, and Ron Richards Guest: Brandon Lee Subscribe to All About Android at https://twit.tv/shows/all-about-android. Sponsor: ZipRecruiter.com/android

Chromecast With Google TV, Nest Audio, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a 5G Walking through every device from Google's Fall event. Pixel 5 is less than premium, but good enough. Pixel 4a XL is the goldilocks device of the lineup. Chromecast with Google TV is appealing but lacks Stadia support. Nest Audio is the first major Google Home update in four years. Bringing Google TV to Android TV devices is possible. Android 11 kills Daydream once and for all. ASUS unveils the ROG Phone 3 for gamers and spec mongers. RCS is rolling out in New Zealand. Does the unlocked Pixel 5 work on Verizon? What is the true IP rating of the Pixel 5? Read our show notes here: https://bit.ly/3iCiAdX Hosts: Jason Howell, Florence Ion, and Ron Richards Guest: Brandon Lee Subscribe to All About Android at https://twit.tv/shows/all-about-android. Sponsor: ZipRecruiter.com/android

Chromecast With Google TV, Nest Audio, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a 5G Walking through every device from Google's Fall event. Pixel 5 is less than premium, but good enough. Pixel 4a XL is the goldilocks device of the lineup. Chromecast with Google TV is appealing but lacks Stadia support. Nest Audio is the first major Google Home update in four years. Bringing Google TV to Android TV devices is possible. Android 11 kills Daydream once and for all. ASUS unveils the ROG Phone 3 for gamers and spec mongers. RCS is rolling out in New Zealand. Does the unlocked Pixel 5 work on Verizon? What is the true IP rating of the Pixel 5? Read our show notes here: https://bit.ly/3iCiAdX Hosts: Jason Howell, Florence Ion, and Ron Richards Guest: Brandon Lee Subscribe to All About Android at https://twit.tv/shows/all-about-android. Sponsor: ZipRecruiter.com/android

Chromecast With Google TV, Nest Audio, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a 5G Walking through every device from Google's Fall event. Pixel 5 is less than premium, but good enough. Pixel 4a XL is the goldilocks device of the lineup. Chromecast with Google TV is appealing but lacks Stadia support. Nest Audio is the first major Google Home update in four years. Bringing Google TV to Android TV devices is possible. Android 11 kills Daydream once and for all. ASUS unveils the ROG Phone 3 for gamers and spec mongers. RCS is rolling out in New Zealand. Does the unlocked Pixel 5 work on Verizon? What is the true IP rating of the Pixel 5? Read our show notes here: https://bit.ly/3iCiAdX Hosts: Jason Howell, Florence Ion, and Ron Richards Guest: Brandon Lee Subscribe to All About Android at https://twit.tv/shows/all-about-android. Sponsor: ZipRecruiter.com/android

Chromecast With Google TV, Nest Audio, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a 5G Walking through every device from Google's Fall event. Pixel 5 is less than premium, but good enough. Pixel 4a XL is the goldilocks device of the lineup. Chromecast with Google TV is appealing but lacks Stadia support. Nest Audio is the first major Google Home update in four years. Bringing Google TV to Android TV devices is possible. Android 11 kills Daydream once and for all. ASUS unveils the ROG Phone 3 for gamers and spec mongers. RCS is rolling out in New Zealand. Does the unlocked Pixel 5 work on Verizon? What is the true IP rating of the Pixel 5? Read our show notes here: https://bit.ly/3iCiAdX Hosts: Jason Howell, Florence Ion, and Ron Richards Guest: Brandon Lee Subscribe to All About Android at https://twit.tv/shows/all-about-android. Sponsor: ZipRecruiter.com/android

Chromecast With Google TV, Nest Audio, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a 5G Walking through every device from Google's Fall event. Pixel 5 is less than premium, but good enough. Pixel 4a XL is the goldilocks device of the lineup. Chromecast with Google TV is appealing but lacks Stadia support. Nest Audio is the first major Google Home update in four years. Bringing Google TV to Android TV devices is possible. Android 11 kills Daydream once and for all. ASUS unveils the ROG Phone 3 for gamers and spec mongers. RCS is rolling out in New Zealand. Does the unlocked Pixel 5 work on Verizon? What is the true IP rating of the Pixel 5? Read our show notes here: https://bit.ly/3iCiAdX Hosts: Jason Howell, Florence Ion, and Ron Richards Guest: Brandon Lee Subscribe to All About Android at https://twit.tv/shows/all-about-android. Sponsor: ZipRecruiter.com/android

Curious Tech Podcast Episode 133 - Pixel Perfect This week we talk about Minecraft coming to Smash Bros, Disney+ getting GroupWatch, and the big Google Hardware event! The Curious Tech podcast featuring Hobie Henning and Devynn Rizo. We chat about technology, robots, 3D printers, photography, or anything else that strikes our fancy. Cool Robot of the week https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/1/21496692/toyota-robots-tri-research-institute-home-helping-gantry-ceiling-machine Picks of the Week Devynn Fall Guys https://fallguys.com/ Hobie - Memoji Watch Face - Apple WatchOS 7 https://www.apple.com/watchos/watchos-7/ All the Social Things Twitter @Devynnjcr https://twitter.com/Devynnjcr Twitter @Hobiehenning http://twitter.com/hobiehenning

Garmin & Fitbit Watches, Keurig With WiFi, the Google Hardware Event Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Matthew Cassinelli For full show notes on this episode, visit https://twit.tv/shows/smart-tech-today/episodes/48 Sponsors: expressvpn.com/stt Molekule.com promo code STT

Garmin & Fitbit Watches, Keurig With WiFi, the Google Hardware Event Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Matthew Cassinelli For full show notes on this episode, visit https://twit.tv/shows/smart-tech-today/episodes/48 Sponsors: expressvpn.com/stt Molekule.com promo code STT

Garmin & Fitbit Watches, Keurig With WiFi, the Google Hardware Event Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Matthew Cassinelli For full show notes on this episode, visit https://twit.tv/shows/smart-tech-today/episodes/48 Sponsors: expressvpn.com/stt Molekule.com promo code STT

Garmin & Fitbit Watches, Keurig With WiFi, the Google Hardware Event Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Matthew Cassinelli For full show notes on this episode, visit https://twit.tv/shows/smart-tech-today/episodes/48 Sponsors: expressvpn.com/stt Molekule.com promo code STT

Philipp & Philipp planen einen Live-Podcast auf der PAKCon 2020. Pip muss sich noch einmal über das relativ geglückte Palantir Going-Public und die begrenzte Kompetenz der Finanzexperten Luft machen. Nachdem Philipp Gloeckler das Asana Listing kommentiert, bombardiert er Pip mit Fragen zur optimalen Ecommerce Organisation, Amazon, LinkedIn Arbitrage mit Facebook Lookalike Audiences, den besten Targeting Hacks und einer Hörerfrage zur Wissensaufnahme. Weiterhin hat Google letzte Woche GoogleTV, Nest Audio und das neue Pixel 5 vorgestellt und mit dem Google News Showcase Projekt die Verlagswirtschaft für ein paar Jahre besänftigt.

On All About Android, Ron Richards, Jason Howell, and Florence Ion celebrate Android 11 coming to Android TV, and then are let down by the limited scope of the release and what it might mean for next week's Google Hardware announcement event. For the full episode, visit twit.tv/aaa/491 Hosts: Ron Richards and Jason Howell You can find more about TWiT and subscribe to our full shows at https://twit.tv/shows/

On All About Android, Ron Richards, Jason Howell, and Florence Ion celebrate Android 11 coming to Android TV, and then are let down by the limited scope of the release and what it might mean for next week's Google Hardware announcement event. For the full episode, visit twit.tv/aaa/491 Hosts: Ron Richards and Jason Howell You can find more about TWiT and subscribe to our full shows at https://twit.tv/shows/

On All About Android, Ron Richards, Jason Howell, and Florence Ion celebrate Android 11 coming to Android TV, and then are let down by the limited scope of the release and what it might mean for next week's Google Hardware announcement event. For the full episode, visit twit.tv/aaa/491 Hosts: Ron Richards and Jason Howell You can find more about TWiT and subscribe to our full shows at https://twit.tv/shows/

On All About Android, Ron Richards, Jason Howell, and Florence Ion celebrate Android 11 coming to Android TV, and then are let down by the limited scope of the release and what it might mean for next week's Google Hardware announcement event. For the full episode, visit twit.tv/aaa/491 Hosts: Ron Richards and Jason Howell You can find more about TWiT and subscribe to our full shows at https://twit.tv/shows/

This week we start with some insight into YouTube Music's long-awaited cloud upload locker then talk about declining hardware sales for Made by Google. We then recap what Google Maps announced for its 15th anniversary — yes, that icon. Alphabet Scoop is available on Google Play, Google Podcasts, iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, and through our dedicated RSS feed for Pocket Casts and other podcast players. New episodes of Alphabet Scoop are recorded every Thursday afternoon at 4-5 PM ET and published on Friday mornings. Subscribe to our podcast in Google Play or your favorite podcast player to guarantee new episodes are delivered as soon as they're available. Hosts: Stephen Hall Abner Li Links: Sources: Internal YouTube Music gains music library upload as Play Music transition nears ‘Made by Google’ is a 'multibillion-dollar revenue business,' but Q4 2019 hardware sales see decline Alphabet reports Q4 2019 revenue of $46.07 billion, $15B/year YouTube ad revenue YouTube Music/Premium has 20 million paid subscribers, 2M for YouTube TV Google Maps gets new public transit features, 'Live View' to expand this year Google Maps gets redesigned mobile app, brand new logo on 15th birthday Google Photos trialing monthly subscription to get your best pictures auto-printed Feedback? Drop us a line at gtips@9to5g.com. You can also soon rate us in Google Play, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts or recommend us in Pocket Casts to help more people discover the show. https://youtu.be/AjdCTTv3YjM

Happy holidays + new year! We’re rebroadcasting a favorite episode from the archives. Enjoy! Google’s Head of Hardware Design, Ivy Ross, learned from her industrial designer father how to see the world for how it’s made, and for the possibilities of how it could be remade. Early professional success as a jewelry designer taught her that life is not about ego hits, it’s about the journey. Fueled by curiosity, she’s traveled through the corporate world as a way to keep learning. She approaches work like conducting an orchestra - drawing out the best in individuals to create beautiful music as a team.  Images and more from our guest! We would LOVE for you to fill out our listener survey. Thank you for your input! Please say Hi on social! Twitter, Instagram and Facebook - @CleverPodcast, @amydevers, @designmilk If you enjoy Clever we could use your support! Please consider leaving a review, making a donation, becoming a sponsor, or introducing us to your friends! We love and appreciate you!   Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors: Wacom - The Wacom Cintiq 16 creative pen display and accompanying Pro Pen 2 are the perfect tools to take your creative ideas to the next level. For more information, head to Wacom.com and use promo code CLEVER to get $50 off of the Cintiq 16 May 1-July 31, 2019. Sunski - Sunski’s polarized shades are designed for stylish adventure. Their sunglasses are strong, comfortable and made from recycled plastic, all for a fair price. See Sunski’s Red Dot award-winning shades and save 10% using code CLEVER at Sunski.com/clever. Clever is created, hosted and produced by Amy Devers and Jaime Derringer, aka 2VDE Media, with music from El Ten Eleven and editing by Rich Stroffolino. Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk.

Big week for both Google and Riot Games, and we discuss why!

We're now a week removed from the arrival of all the new Google Hardware for the Fall 2019 season. The show was great and now that we've had some time to reflect and decompress a bit, our feelings and reactions have become quite a bit more clear about all we saw at the event. The main thoughts in this episode surround the Pixelbook Go and the Pixel 4/4XL. The Pixelbook Go has arrived in the office to pretty rave reviews by anyone who's spent a few moments with it. We have a couple videos up already of the unboxing and the pre-review, but we can say it is easily one of the best Chromebooks of 2019 and we spend quite a bit of time explaining exactly why that is. For the Pixel 4, however, the reception has not been good. As a matter of fact, we actually have a video coming out about this phone and why no one at Chrome Unboxed has actually ordered one yet. There's a lot that goes into this, so stick around for the whole show and see why we're so high on the Pixelbook Go and so ‘meh' on the Pixel 4. NOTABLE LINKS 3 things I love about Pixelbook Go after 1 week [VIDEO] The ASUS Chromebook Flip C433 is officially available and it's on sale Exclusive: ASUS Chromebook Flip C433 unboxing & hands-on [VIDEO] Unboxing the Pixelbook Go This episode is brought to to you by NordVPN. Secure your browsing on any device and keep your private data to yourself! CLICK HERE to try it out and get 75% off a three-year plan for a limited time! This episode is also brought to you by Blue Apron. Perfectly-Portioned, chef designed meals delivered to your doorstep. Ready in 20 Minutes. Step-By-Step Recipes. Freshness Guaranteed. CLICK HERE to get started. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/chromeunboxed/support

Als je alle bezwaren wegdenkt, zou je dan apparaten met spraak willen bedienen? Het is een van de vele prikkelende discussiepunten in deze Tweakers Podcast. Je kunt, zo blijkt, prima praten over praten.  De aanleiding is natuurlijk het Google-event van afgelopen dinsdag. Want Google stopt zijn Assistant in al zijn apparaten en voorziet ze allemaal van microfoontjes en speakertjes, maar wil je dat wel en gebruik je het ook? Hardwaredacteur Julian Huijbregts en Wout onthullen hoe zij hun Google Home-speaker gebruiken, terwijl Arnoud hen een Assistant-vaardigheid uitlegt die zij nog niet kenden. Uiteraard nemen we ook alle nieuwe Google-hardware kort door. Ook discussiëren we over de recente ontwikkelingen rond Apple en de Chinese overheid. Waren Apples statement over mensenrechten en privacy alleen maar voor de bühne? Is het logisch dat bedrijven uiteindelijk tóch kiezen voor het geld? Wout begint met een disclaimer 'we zijn geen politieke podcast', waarna we het uitgebreid hebben over hoe techbedrijven omgaan met politiek, economie en cultuur. Wout wil bovendien nog even een 'in memoriam' houden voor Windows Phone, het ooit veelbelovende derde besturingssysteem van de smartphonemarkt. Maar als het besturingssysteem een weg is, hoe belangrijk is het nog om wegen te bouwen of moet je vooral auto's gaan verkopen? Kortom: hoe belangrijk is een besturingssysteem in een wereld van diensten? Over wegen en auto's gesproken: de zonne-auto's in de World Solar Challenge staan op het punt van finishen. De Nederlandse koploper viel uit na een harde windvlaag, maar ondanks de concurrentie van een Belgisch team komt er vermoedelijk toch een Nederlandse winnaar in het 'allround schaatsen van de techsector'. 01:18 Zijwind in de World Solar Challenge 5:36 Apple in China en het verschil in cultuur 17:16 En nog even over Windows Phone 23:58 Googles verwarrende verkoopstrategie 32:08 De line-up van Google in vogelvlucht 39:50 Assistent in alles 52:45 Sneakpeek Support the show.

Oreos are amazing. Two solid cookies with something flavored in the middle. Think of this episode like an Oreo. This is the middle bit between two tech wrap up shows. Last week, in 194, we covered the Microsoft Surface event. And in 196 we ll cover the upcoming Google Hardware announcements. J.J. is traveling this week. Which left Joe to fly solo with this Features Format show. Just a word of warning, for those listening in on or near Google Assistant phones or devices the Google wake phrase gets used a lot this week. Information And Helpful Links Here are some resources on the technology featured in this episode. Move your music between rooms with stream transfer And Chromecast Set up & manage Routines With The Google Assistant Our previous look at the Vizio 55 P from BBQ 166 Game on: Your Xbox One now works with the Google Assistant Airplay 2 & Homekit On Vizio Tvs SEGA Genesis Mini Official Site The Sega Genesis Mini is getting its own ridiculous mini tower DF Retro: Sega Genesis Mini/ Mega Drive Mini Review: The Ultimate Nostalgia Trip

Hos Google laver de små science fiction film af fremtidens mulige produkter og viser dem for hinanden. Den erfaring bringer dansk Google-designer med til INDEX:Award. #designtoimprovelife er missionen for den internationale designpris INDEX:Award, som har hjemme i København. Siden 2005 er prisen bleve uddelt til design (og teknologi), som gør livet bedre for mange. Og her tænkes ikke på gode stole eller smukke lamper, men på designløsninger som kan give højere livskvalitet og nye muligheder for verdens fattigste. Fx sugerøret Lifestraw, der kan rense forurenet vand eller dronefirmaet Zipline, som har stor succes med at levere mad og medicin til afrikanere, som bor i utilgængelige landområder. INDEX:Award uddeles hvert andet år. 2019 finalisterne er netop offentliggjort. Finalisterne er fundet blandt 1.800 forslag, som er crowdsourcet via nettet. Juryformanden er danske Philip Battin fra Google, der her i Techtopia lige om lidt løfter sløret for sit arbejde i Googles tophemmelige X-division og giver sit bud på, hvordan den erfaring kan bruges til design, som kan redde liv. Bagefter kan du høre CEO Liza Chong fra The Index Project pege på, at vi er i akutte problemer som menneskehed i form af klimatrusler, og hvordan en designpris kan bruges i den kamp for overlevelse. Medvirkende: Philip Battin, design manager, Google Hardware Liza Chong, CEO, INDEX:Design to Improve Life Links: INDEX:Award finalister https://theindexproject.org/award/winnersandfinalists Philip Battin https://www.philipbattin.com/ INDEX:Award https://theindexproject.org/award/

Google’s Head of Hardware Design, Ivy Ross, learned from her industrial designer father how to see the world for how it’s made, and for the possibilities of how it could be remade. Early professional success as a jewelry designer taught her that life is not about ego hits, it’s about the journey. Fueled by curiosity, she’s traveled through the corporate world as a way to keep learning. She approaches work like conducting an orchestra - drawing out the best in individuals to create beautiful music as a team. Images and more from our guest! We would LOVE for you to fill out our listener survey. Thank you for your input! Please say Hi on social! Twitter, Instagram and Facebook - @CleverPodcast, @amydevers, @designmilk If you enjoy Clever we could use your support! Please consider leaving a review, making a donation, becoming a sponsor, or introducing us to your friends! We love and appreciate you! Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors: Wacom - The Wacom Cintiq 16 creative pen display and accompanying Pro Pen 2 are the perfect tools to take your creative ideas to the next level. For more information, head to Wacom.com and use promo code CLEVER to get $50 off of the Cintiq 16 May 1-July 31, 2019. Sunski - Sunski’s polarized shades are designed for stylish adventure. Their sunglasses are strong, comfortable and made from recycled plastic, all for a fair price. See Sunski’s Red Dot award-winning shades and save 10% using code CLEVER at Sunski.com/clever. Clever is created, hosted and produced by Amy Devers and Jaime Derringer, aka 2VDE Media, with music from El Ten Eleven and editing by Rich Stroffolino. Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk.

Sadiq and Cristian talk about Halo, Android Q, laugh at Google's tablet team, and Spotify. Show Notes: 00:00:00 - Halo MCC Coming To PC 00:11:40 - Android Q Beta 00:17:52 - Google Scaling Back Laptop And Tablet Team 00:20:39 - Spotify V Apple Halo MCC Coming to PC Paid Xbox Live Not Needed For PC Reach Multiplayer Will Be Free On Xbox Hands-on: What’s new in Android Q Android Q Beta 1 no longer allows services to launch activities, breaking the core functionality of many apps. Google blocked the thread on issue tracker. Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet development, cancels products Apple V Spotify A Timeline: How we got here Spotify files antitrust complaint over ‘Apple tax’ Addressing Spotify’s claims Spotify Responds to Apple’s Response Over App Store Flap, Calls Company a ‘Monopolist’ Transcript available here. Contact: Cristian Online Cristian on Mastodon Sadiq on Mastodon Sadiq Online Subscribe on: Apple Podcasts | Google Play | Spotify | Overcast| Pocketcasts | RSS  

Sadiq and Cristian talk about Halo, Android Q, laugh at Google's tablet team, and Spotify. Show Notes: 00:00:00 - Halo MCC Coming To PC 00:11:40 - Android Q Beta 00:17:52 - Google Scaling Back Laptop And Tablet Team 00:20:39 - Spotify V Apple Halo MCC Coming to PC Paid Xbox Live Not Needed For PC Reach Multiplayer Will Be Free On Xbox Hands-on: What’s new in Android Q Android Q Beta 1 no longer allows services to launch activities, breaking the core functionality of many apps. Google blocked the thread on issue tracker. Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet development, cancels products Apple V Spotify A Timeline: How we got here Spotify files antitrust complaint over ‘Apple tax’ Addressing Spotify’s claims Spotify Responds to Apple’s Response Over App Store Flap, Calls Company a ‘Monopolist’ Transcript available here. Contact: Cristian Online Cristian on Mastodon Sadiq on Mastodon Sadiq Online Subscribe on: Apple Podcasts | Google Play | Spotify | Overcast| Pocketcasts | RSS  

On Wednesday 30th January, we brought our podcast - Serious Influence - to a live event. Under discussion was - 'What makes a great influencer campaign in 2019?' The panel was hosted by Blogosphere's founder Alice Audley and the panellists were - Sara Tasker (Me and Orla - Influencer), Rupa Shah (HashtagAd founder and ASA regulations expert), Kat Perriam (Head of Influencer Marketing, Google Hardware), Nik Speller (Head of Campaigns, Influencer) and Danny Defreitas (Influencer).

In this special crossover episode, Google Method shares an interview from Design Notes—a show about creative work and what it teaches us. Taped at Google Design’s 2018 SPAN Helsinki conference, host Aaron Lammer interviews Isabelle Olsson about her journey to becoming an industrial designer and the intricacies of crafting the design language for Google Hardware. From learning the basics of design from her grandfather (a self-taught industrial designer) to her fascination with materiality and color, tune in as Olsson discusses why it’s critical for designers to be inspired by the context in which products live. Meet our guest: Isabelle Olsson leads industrial design for Home, Wearables, and Color, Material, Finish (CMF) across all Google Hardware. Before joining Google, she was an industrial designer at Fuseproject and OSM.   Do you have a burning question for a designer at Google? Or a story you’d love to hear? Give us feedback in this short survey to help make the show even better.  

Alina Díaz of Cassandra explains the differences between Millennial and Gen Z shopping habits, why young shoppers prefer stores in side streets over high streets, how human connection is still important to the shopping experience and why recent Timberland and Google Hardware pop-ups were successful.  Sarah Quinn of Connect Media talks about her own own shopping habits and the particular appeal of Platform, an LA shopping and creative office redevelopment.  Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android  Listen: WhereWeBuy.show  Alexa: Say "Enable the Where We Buy skill" Tweet: @JamesDCook Email: jamesd.cook@am.jll.com  Instagram: @jamcoo Leave a message on the Where We Buy hotline. We may use it on an upcoming show. Call (602) 633-4061  Read more retail research here. James Cook is the director of retail research in the Americas for JLL.  Theme music is Run in the Night by The Good Lawdz, under Creative Commons license.

Happy Birthday, to Jason's wife, Leila! Scot Wingo is contributing the Forbes Digital Council, and writing about his new Vehicle 2.0 Framework.  Introducing Vehicle 2.0.  Jason Goldberg is also contributing to a regular retail column on Forbes, starting with his first article: What Competitors Are Missing About Amazon's New 4-Star Retail Concept. Scot is appearing in a national TV spot promoting his alma mater, North Carolina State, "Think and Do!" Jason is leading several sessions at GroceryShop October 28-31 in Las Vegas, including a keynote interview with Sam's Club Chief Merchant Ashley Buchanan. Amazon Earnings: Amazon's third-quarter earnings beat Street estimates, but its revenue and fourth-quarter outlook fell short of expectations. Revenue: Revenue increased +29% Y/Y (+30% ex-FX) to $56.58B, 1% below the Street's $57.11B. 29% Revenue growth was below consensus expectations as Int’l revenue disappointed with a ~$1B shortfall. North America revenue (ex-AWS and ex-WF) of $30.10B was up 25%, in line with 2Q18 growth. International revenue of $15.55B was up 13% (+15% ex-FX), a notable deceleration from 27% growth in Q2 (+21% ex-FX). AWS revenue of $6.68B was up 46%, down from +49% growth in Q2 but in line with expectations. Physical Stores revenue of $4.25B was slightly ahead of consensus expectations. Amazon's "other" category, aka advertising, jumped 123% to $2.5 billion in revenue AWS revenue: $6.68 billion vs. $6.71 billion estimated, according to FactSet Net income, meanwhile, grew more than 10-times from the year-ago period, to a record-high $2.8 billion, marking the fourth straight quarter of topping $1 billion in profits. The $3.7 billion in operating income far-exceeded Street estimates of $2.1 billion GAAP Operating Income of $3.72B was higher than the Street's $2.12B. Gross margin of 41.7% came in above the Street's 40.5%. GAAP Operating Income margin of 6.6% was higher than the Street's 3.7%. Profitability, once again, was a positive surprise with Op Inc ~$1.5B ahead of consensus expectations, Other News: Implications of the US pulling out of UPU Treaty Implications of Sears bankruptcy Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 149 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, October 25th, 2018. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at SapientRazorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Transcript Jason: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 149 being recorded on Monday October 25th 2018 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host and television spokesmodel Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:46] Hey Jason welcome back Jason Scott show us nurse yeah yeah yeah. So if you're at the front should I guess we'll will preface it's been a couple weeks but a show out so apologies to everybody we have been just crazy busy and what Jason's referencing there is I did a small video for this NC State thing and then end up being in a promotion that they are nationally a lot of people have seen it so that's been fun we'll put a link to it in the show notes so NC state has the motto which is thinking do, I am and I'm featured in there talking about they can do. Jason: [1:26] And they are airing at like on ESPN during the games. Scot: [1:30] Yeah when the when the college's nobody watch college football UIC usually during halftime they get two spots that they can kind of do a promotional video about University each University gifts and this is one they've been running for. Jason: [1:45] That's it's totally awesome I'm just saying it's my animated screensaver now so just so you know. Scot: [1:50] It's a little creepy but whatever floats your boat Jason. Jason: [1:56] Not even the weirdest thing about me. Scot: [1:58] Another fun fact is we are both contribute to Forbes you had a really good article where you you went through your Amazon go store the force Star Story. Jason: [2:13] Yeah and you are like some fancier CIO contributor if I'm not mistaken. Scot: [2:21] Yeah if you have the tech Advisory board or some such and I am writing about vehicle 2.0 which is a framework we've developed its if he for thinking about the future of cars which seems like it wouldn't have anything to do about e-commerce but it's kind of interesting. The first of all you have a. Perspective on how fast or how slow this vehicle stops going to go in and then second of all there are overlaps there so for example imagine autonomous vehicles delivering packages. Jason: [2:54] Yep for sure and I suspect in the not-too-distant future will be ordering a lot of packages from our vehicles and in many cases getting delivered to our vehicles. Scot: [3:05] Yes sir that's good and then the in exciting car news so Tesla's new operating system came out so that that has been fun to play with and a lot of the folks that are in the same demographic issue and I the most exciting part about the parade this is the Tesla West Nine is they have an Atari simulator in there as one of the new Easter eggs so that you can't do this while you're driving so full disclosure there. Sadly but I guess safely but it is a lot of fun to play on the touch-screen the various old Atari games, most fun one probably is Missile Command because he was always super frustrating to have to deal with that track ball and you can never get faster left right it in your little basis would get destroyed so now you can kind of do a two-finger thing and it makes it a lot easier to save your bases file. Jason: [3:57] I am always jealous when you get a new upgrade because I just think that's the coolest thing that you're you go to bed and wake up in your car has been upgraded it makes me want to like go out and get a fancy new cup holder or something for my car. Scot: [4:10] Yes you could. You could get a Tesla you should. Jason: [4:14] Yep despite the fact that my wife and I have no commute in the car is almost exclusively used by a three-year-old shirt. Scot: [4:21] Call Anna Jason you got a lot of stuff you can be doing here either this week or next week. Jason: [4:31] Yeah the the these next two weeks are super busy for me on the personal front this is the busiest week of the year for me tonight is my wife's birthday, inside of a side-note shout out to you honey happy birthday she most wanted to celebrate it by having me catch up. With the podcast cuz she knew the listeners were frustrated with the, the Gap we've had and her main request for her birthday is she wants to go to the Star Wars experience in Orlando on a joint vacation with the windows so we're going to have to. I think we're gonna have to find a way to make that happen. Scot: [5:13] Absolutely that is one birthday gift I'll be happy to help make happen. Jason: [5:17] Exactly and then it's a crazy fertility week apparently in my family because in addition to my wife's birthday. Tomorrow is like my mother's birthday my mother-in-law's birthday and my father-in-law's birthday. So so we're doing a lot of birthday celebrations this week and then Sunday I shoot out to grocery shop which is this new trade show in Las Vegas this will be the first year. Mainly focused on digital disruption of the grocery category. It's put on by the same folks that started money 20/20 and Shop talk. And I think they were hoping to get like a thousand attendees in this first year and they actually sold out capacity of the venue at 2200 people. So it's it's shaping up to be a really good event and I'm dramatically Overexposed at the event so Sunday night I'll actually be doing the keynote interview with Ashley Buchanan who's the chief Merchant at Sam's Club. So I get to talk to him about digital at Sam's and we'll talk about scan and go and some of their partnership with instacart and some of the other things they're doing hopefully I'll have some. Samara tough questions I'm doing a piano on. [6:36] Brands using product content help build a brand since we got. Folks from the Boston beer company which is like Sam's Sam Adams we've got Chobani what unit or disrupted the the yogurt space and we've got the wonderful company with the almonds and pom wonderful Fiji Water and all that stuff. And then I'm doing a panel on the evolution of the cpg retail relationship we've got constellation Brands which is. A big house of brands in alcohol space I think has Corona amongst others you have a elf Beauty and then a Fairway Market which is a great bespoke grocery retailer in the New York City area so. Some topics that are near and dear to my house heart and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at grocery shop and the. I do have plan I know you're not going to go to join us so that always makes me sad but I do think we're going to get the opportunity to record a couple shows from there with some of the the grocery industry makers. Scot: [7:38] Next year they're going to Rebrand the sink to Jason talk or something like that cuz it seems like you're just doing everything there. Jason: [7:45] Yeah I think that was actually there original premise and then they found out like that the only for family members I could possibly get to attend we're all celebrating their birthday and so they decided to scrap. Scot: [7:56] Expanded to smother people in the loss of that that looks good I look forward to seeing all the social media that comes out of that and and he ran to the interviews any trip reports. Jason: [8:11] I do so, we've talked about Amazon go on the store on the show we did talk after they open the first go store in Chicago they have open to other go stores in Chicago so now we have a. A fleet of ghost tours and then this week or last Thursday Google opened a pop-up shop shop here in in Chicago for the holidays. So Google has done pop ups for several years but they've always been in New York this is their first year in Chicago so I was eager to see. What that look like and I I went and visited it this week so I'll talk about that in just a minute and then. They have announced their first permanent retail store in the US and that is going to be in Chicago there's no official date on when that's opening yet so we're continuing. To watch for updates on that but I'll be interesting to see what a permanent Google Store looks like but the pop-up is really sort of. [9:12] Very similar to pass Google pop-ups it's it's focused on the Google Hardware products so the pixel 3 phone their new home hub which is there a voice assistant that has a screen built-in so it sort of. Competing with Amazon Alexa show. [9:32] They you don't have a a couple cool accessories I've never really smart a wireless charger for the pixel phone. So you know you go to the pop-up they have all the products they had them on launch day. Which would which is kind of cool as the first place outside of Verizon you can get the pixel 3 phone. And they set up a couple of fun vignettes to sort of demo the capability so they have sort of a. A fake record store you can go into and play music using the the Alexa assistance in there that their new high-end audio Fidelity speaker. You can go into a tree house and do a bunch of home automation stuff so you can you know give commands to Google and you know see the shades in the tree house go up and down or change the lighting in a few different things. And they have a kitchen vignette and in the kitchen vignette you can have a bunch of Easter eggs you can give commands and it'll like pop open a drawer with candy in it and some stuff like that so. Some some fun little vignettes to kind of get you experimenting with a Google product but sorta in typical. [10:44] Pop-up shop fashion you know it it really felt more like some sort of Museum exhibits where you could go in and try products rather than a working retail store. [10:57] And you know the it was very sales assisted experience you know there more Google employees in the store then there were customers. [11:06] You know if if you are specifically looking to get Hands-On a Google product it was great opportunity to do that but I'm not sure as a pure retail store. [11:15] It was all that that interesting or or Works particularly well and in my mind the big change from previous Google pop-ups was just sort of the. The visual treatment so in the past they've done he's really kind of techno treatments with a lot of like. Animated light things and fiber optics and you kind of got a very sort of Tron feel from the the Google pop-ups in this Google pop-up was a much more. Sort of the Vintage organic feel so you know instead of a house they had a tree house and they they don't sell these other they should they they're like merchandising all of the. The the phones and he's cool Google tool boxes that they made for the store and so is very white. Sort of organic store with a fake tree in the middle of it and it was two stories and so if you live in Chicago you're interested in some Google products totally worth we're checking it out there are a couple features in the pixel 3 that I'm super jealous up as a. IPhone user they have dramatically improve new spam telephone spam filters which. I feel like I'm getting a lot more telephone spam so that seem cool and they have a great new visual search built into the the camera and incredible new will light features for the camera that seem to be class weaving. Scot: [12:40] Awesome I don't want to. Get you an agitated but I am ambidextrous and my pixel 3 actually just arrived today and I'm going to crack it open after this podcast so I'll do it boxing next week and tell you about all the awesome teacher missing. Jason: [12:57] Exciting I I probably will add one of the beat to I think it is going to be fun and if you have already gotten one spot I do suggest you get the the Google pixel. Wireless charger. It's really smart and clever like unlike traditional wireless chargers it recognizes each individual phone and you can have different settings for each phone it basically turns the phone into a mini Google home hub when you put the phone on the charger it has a bunch of unique features that I feel like everyone else should have thought of but give always the first ones to implement. Scot: [13:31] Awesome I didn't know about that so I appreciate that cool wall decals caught up on outside and it wouldn't be a Jason and Scott show without. Amazon news your margin is there a opportunity. [13:59] Yes Jason said at the top of the show it's Thursday October 25th and. After the market closes today Amazon announced their third quarter earnings and just kind of position awareness if you listen to podcast setting up for Holiday 18 and I like good stuff going on in a little while kind of shaky here in the last couple weeks the stock market's gyrating a bit tariff kind of stuff is accelerating were to talk about some things there later than the show around China impacts so for me this is a really important set up cuz this is kind of the one the last data points work it going into holiday 18. Add a reminder for everybody we tend to think of e-commerce as Baseline going about 15% 1/5 overall retail tubilee grows low-single-digit so 4% so with that being said Amazon did announce their ornax and it's kind of a mixed bag so he was a little light and and I'll go into why but then profitability exceeded expectations so as of the recording of that show the stock is down a tad and a smoke so. [15:20] When you peel the onion on on the top line revenue came in at. 30% year-over-year growth is 56 billion and that was about 1% will at the street was looking for so that one person. Turns out to be about a billion dollars so what's a billion dollars between friends who was largely on the international side Amazon doesn't really give any details about things but reading the tea leaves their you know it feels like there's there's some stuff going on they did annualize some things like suck exertion of some changes they made in India but then also you know I think a lot of the Wall Street analysts are or feeling like this is Felix of tariffs and packed so when item is sold from China and us that counts as it's where the seller is that that counts is international Judy and Skip Bayless so so that could be Amazon on the little bit of that passes Air Force they're going on Ding and revenue little bit more when you look at North America and you take out just when you just get the retail North America that snow cloud computing. [16:33] Whole Foods is a 25% begin to put this in perspective Amazon overall grew about 30% even that it's amazing you know huge 800 lb scale North America grew at 25% and then International only grew about 15% which is a pretty steep deceleration from last quarter is 27% of us continue to do really well that 46% and a physical stores came in right at expectations one of the stupidest things we like to talk about on the show is the advertising that continues to grow triple digits that grew a hundred 23% and is now 2.5 billion dollars and yeah that that just kind of looking at the trend overtime book with this the show notes so you'll get you one of 18 at 132% U2 under 29% you 323% so little bit of a slow down but really just continues to be white hot that eternity Jason for some other highlights. Jason: [17:42] Yep it's always hard to talk about a Slowdown in growth when it's still over 100%. That's a first world problem for sure but it's it was sort of a bifurcated story you I got the, the revenue was a slight Miss for the quarter but earnings for the quarter were really strong so they were. 2.8 billion for the quarter which is the their highest earnings ever that means that's four straight quarters that they've earned over a billion dollars in profit hopefully that. Scot: [18:18] Jason. Jason: [18:20] I was just going to say I hope I hope that finally puts to bed the the silly myths that they're not profitable. That is wildin more profitable than they were just a short time ago so that is like 10 x their profit from a year ago and that earnings was a pretty solid beat on the market expectation so on the one hand you go man they say we miss Revenue but they blew away earnings that should be a great story but then you know they gave their guidance for Q4 which was a little soft and disappointing to the market and the ramifications of that is this after hours trading their stock took a meaningful dipso their stock was down 9% tonight, if that holds tomorrow it is conceivable that Microsoft which had a good earnings report yesterday well at least briefly pass Amazon is the second most valuable company so I'm not sure that says anything particular negative about Amazon but that's a pretty impressive run for Microsoft will get themselves on the mixer. Scot: [19:31] There's a little bit of overlap so one of the reasons Microsoft doing well is azure which is their competitor to AWS it seems to be really doing well and and kind of sticking out of a definite second position and nudging out IBM in Google that were trying to get that that second position by the Amazon seems like seems like it's pretty quickly becoming a two-horse race between Microsoft and Amazon. Jason: [19:56] An in general Microsoft is still way behind in Cloud but. As a result able to grow much more quickly and of course in our category of retail what are the one category where you know Amazon faces some headwinds and their major retailers that obviously don't want to use AWS and there's some big powerful retailers like Wal-Mart they really discourage their vendors from using AWS so retail is one one particularly lucrative category for Microsoft azure. Scot: [20:26] Yeah on the. On the marketplace side one of the metrics than Amazon does discloses 2% of orders are units that came from Marketplace sellers last quarter it was 53% and it held steady at 53% again. Don't spend picking up about 1% every quarter so stabilize here at 53%. Jason: [20:53] Yeah and then there you know there after their names there's always the Q&A with a couple of the Business Leaders and, I'm always looking for tidbits there and one question that that Amazon got asked is about ads on the Alexa platform and I was. Happy to see there the guy that weaves investor relations for Amazon say that that they have no plans to, put in the ads on the Alexa platform in the day exclusively want to focus on it being a good customer experience so. Not shocking but but good to affirm that that they're not going there. [21:40] The and then you know kind of following up on the analysis of of the quarter I think you know people are definitely looking at that International softness and you called out like that they laugh their suit. Acquisition so that that probably had a material impact on International growth and then there's this big. Indian holiday it's right on the cusp of a shopping holiday that's right on the cusp of Q3 and Q4 so. Last year it was in Q4 this year it's in Q3 and so they're cute their comps. Mirror over a year are challenge cuz the holiday was in in one year and not the other. One piece of speculation is another report out there estimating the size of the Prime Membership. And that they are reporting that that growth in frying is dramatically slowing down which is, not a huge surprise you know the Amazon themselves they said they have over a hundred million Prime households and that's a global number but in North America there's only like 120 or 240 million households depend on how you count so it and it has to be getting harder for Amazon acquire more. Prime households and if it is in fact true that they're requiring us households than that certainly would have an effect on on future quarters growth so that's going to be an interesting thing to what. Scot: [23:09] Yeah yeah once you've kind of have every household on Prime then it becomes a saturation game to see the one thing on the fourth-quarter guides that you mentioned is it was a little soft on Revenue but but about 8% off on the prophet side and Amazon's not being specific about it but one thing they did announce that we haven't heard on the stove is there increasing everyone's wage for warehouse workers to $50 there's a lot of controversy around this so so this was a reaction to a lot of politics going on Bernie Sanders has been kind of lighting them up these ladies kind of but I think as an ox we're kind of silly things where they'll take Jeff bezos's net worth in / 365 and don't say that that's how much he makes a day or so. [24:05] Forgets the 20 years where he you know took tons of building Amazon but whatever I do dress and there is a point there that there is a large disparity between his of the top echelons of Amazon warehouse workers to Amazon straighten that out by $50 an hour doing so they get rid of stock options and some other things that they don't like that I can't win so that in the lot of people trash come over getting rid of those things so that being said it is a prematurely and talk to literally hundreds of thousands of employees so a lot of speculation that. Big head wind on the bottom line going in the fourth quarter is going to be that that wage increase Warehouse her. Jason: [24:52] Yep and I I think they were specifically asked if that it was going to have a material impact and Amazon didn't comment on the exact impact of the wage increase but that that wasn't pretty like from my view a pretty Savvy move you know there's been this trend in retail for a while you don't return a really competing for talent you know unemployment is low so it it's hard to get people and we've seen both Target and Walmart you like dramatically increase there starting wages in an effort to improve the quality of the workforce and then you know Amazon came in and LeapFrog them in and Amazon is competing for four people at this point to fill those Protomen centers in so that like I'm sure there was some political advantage in doing that like that you know I do think in a lot of ways it's the right thing to do I was here for the employees. [25:48] But it also just is a capitalistic thing to do in terms of making sure that you get the input the workforce that you need in this competitive environment so be interesting to see even what economic impact it has but the other question that they got about the financial impact in this going to happen thank you for is the u.s. postal rate increase that is coming and am I was pretty clear that they did not feel that the postal increase was going to materially affect them into me this is another one of these sort of funny ironies where. [26:28] You know that the president that appears to have some animosity towards Jeff Bezos adopts an issue and then some some which situation gets past like the sales tax Supreme Court ruling or now this postal rate and you know that you like him superficially is tweeting that this is going to have some negative impact on Amazon Amazon. [26:52] Has more ways to deliver packages than everyone else they have more of their own package delivery and so the operations folks and Amazon or like no we're just going to be smarter about which of our delivery vehicles we use only think we're going to be able to absorb that rate increase and of course no other retailer has those levers to pull in so like the postal rates going up actually is a competitive Advantage for Amazon versus the rest of the market that doesn't deliver 15% of their own packages like Amazon does. Scot: [27:24] Yeah to that vein couple of tidbits so there's a lot of video surfacing of Amazon order to something like 20 to 40,000 Prime delivery dance these are really nice there these Mercedes sprinters and I don't know about you in Chicago but in the Research Triangle the Raleigh-Durham area I probably see four or five of those a day right now and it started where they were going to large corporations so where were there a lot with my stuffy and your folks are reporting to Neo at Cisco and Citrix and MetLife. All these large employers there seeing the Amazon big ants go there a couple times a day and then now it seems, large Prime neighborhoods deserve this kind of replicating the FedEx Ground model to FedEx ground not realize this but the next error is W-2 employees FedEx Ground as a 1099 network of local stores that are given license to FedEx brand and they operate ground on behalf of their local businesses so, Amazon your kind of started. [28:35] This mix of some fulfillment center employees are driving these things and I talked to several of them and the ones I've talked to her are full on Amazon employees but a lot of them also are these 1099s ramazan will set you up in your own little 1099 delivery to you certain number of packages and effectively a dollar per package so your point pretty fast meeting at Amazon that really wrapping that up. Jason: [29:05] Yep. A couple of other pieces of Amazon news not necessary related to earnings but Amazon did launch a new credit card in partnership with Amex this I think maybe you last week that was targeted at small businesses and it has some interesting features it's a no fee Amex or if the first time you can get a free MX and. They sort of have variable terms for each purchase that you can select at the time of purchase in Amazon so that so there's a unique user interface in Amazon for purchases better. Completed with this credit card and so you can say for example that I want to use my Amazon reward points to pay for this purchase or you can say I'm going to, pay back this credit card charge in the next 30 days and you get 5% back for doing that or you can select these 90-day terms. You know take 90 days to pay for the purchase so kind of an interesting tighter integration between Amazon and Amex. You know what I'm always interested in those kinds of tie-ins because you know payment is such a. A potential competitive advantage in the e-commerce pay so it's interesting to see Amazon doing that. [30:26] I mentioned earlier that we now have 3 ghost tours in Chicago we also had the the first go store open in San Francisco this week so these things are rapidly opening. Side note kudos to the Amazon real estate team they've actually done a phenomenal job of hiding a lot of these stores from the media which is you know. Carefully carefully watching property managers to figure out where all these stores are and I I know it's Amazon's been a pretty good job of surprising us all with some of these openings. I had an interesting little debate with some folks on Twitter this week. [31:01] You know as as it seems clear that they're opening a network of these stores and there is that Bloomberg report that they're going to have it three thousand of these go stores buy. 2022. Doug Stevens a retail author and and subject matter expert me to tweet saying. You know that 7-Eleven is now on the clock. They're going to get dramatically disrupted by Amazon and they're really not ready for it and I sort of made a smart alec or reply. You know while I've never would tell anyone not to worry about Amazon I'm not sure that first and foremost Amazon go is likely to affect 7-Eleven I said that. You know probably print amazed year or hobo pie. Are at much more risk from the Amazon go store then 7-Eleven is and my contention is the ghost or is really a restaurant. You know whose main mission is to get you lunch when you only have a half hour lunch break and that it's it's not really a competitor to a traditional convenience store in so some folks on Twitter jumped in and we had a we had a good healthy debate about that then. Obviously the Ender Wintergreen I'm right. Scot: [32:11] Or they got blocked. Jason: [32:14] Yeah alright I just scream them exactly a side-note top three categories at 7-Eleven. 7-Eleven sells a ton of gas which Amazon go stores don't sell yet 7-Eleven sells a lot of tobacco which Amazon doesn't sell at all and then they sell a lot of alcohol which Amazon go only sells in one store in Seattle so you know where food is in a growing part of 7-Elevens business it's not even a top 3 category and it's it's like 95% of the skews in this this ghost or so that's why I think Joe is much more of a restaurant than a traditional convenience store. Scot: [32:53] When one last reminder is it's been a little over a year since it was on announce their hunt for hq2 so Alaska chelation is that we should be hearing about that here in the fourth quarter. Amazon said it would take about a year now it's firm you this involves a lot of details and local governments and stuff so I. Adders reversing a ramp up of speculation around hq2 stuff I'm kind of interested. You know there's a lot going on in Chicago not pick on Chicago's great City. For all the other stuff they've done the kind of event Seattle York and Chicago but now they're just really pouring it on in Chicago I wonder if that so I could slide indication that maybe Chicago's kind of pulling into one of the top. Possible locations for hq2. Jason: [33:50] Yeah it would be interesting with my wife and I were driving around town today and there's a ton of trains building conda commented like do the the condo developers know something about Amazon that we don't know. That. Why do you think Chicago is a interesting market for Amazon and you know it's a good test Market because it is it does. I have a broad representative demographic I personally would be a little surprised if it's here but that being said I suspect we're all going to know pretty soon. Scot: [34:28] And then you use it surfaced at nursing little spot between Amazon and eBay. Jason: [34:34] Oh yeah so you may actually filed a lawsuit against Amazon and it related to Amazon potentially trying to steal top Marketplace Sellers from eBay and the reason I was a lawsuit is the allegation is that the way Amazon was doing this is they very systematically infiltrated a private chat board for these eBay sellers and created a bunch of fake personas and you know what we're reaching out in Contin privately contacting sellers, through like a pretty sophisticated alleged hacking of this this site eBay communication platform and you like it it seems like they have a fair amount of evidence it is true it's a little surprising to me that there's someone in Amazon's position would do, you know I would certainly presume that wasn't a corporate directed to do this but that you know someone had enough autonomy to do this and can put off of that scale it would be interesting so I don't know what the real story is there but it's going to be fun to watch the lawsuit play out as a an interested Observer. Scot: [35:55] Cool so that that kind of wraps up our Amazon part of the show and then we had a lot of listeners that were sad that we we took a little break there so apologies for that and then two other topics that it looks really wanting this hit on IR Sears and then this really big change to the u p u which is squarely in your. [36:18] Your wheelhouse Jason saw the Sears side there was kind of two buckets of questions we got from listeners one was really you know some folks selling on the Sears Marketplace or are you in this would apply a guest to vendors yo what what should I do to Sears in her chapter 11 bankruptcy what percentage of the time companies come out of bankruptcy other times they don't and when they don't they're they leave creditors sitting there kind of holding the bag and a lot of times adders even a Marketplace seller would be considered under their left holding the bag and then the other thing so I'll tackle that one in the other one Jason was over all kind of Redan what's this really mean for retail my guidance would be you know it's all a risk tolerance question and Anna scale question so if you're you know if if you did have a speed bump and you lost you know usually is inside of trailing 30-day payment type cycle skiers of material enough that you did lose 30 days of that cash because of a bankruptcy if that is you know pretty. [37:32] Material to your business to be getting packs it out of 10 percentage I would start trimming my sales for selling on Sears and reduced to a tryst September set yes it was I think that's the prudent thing from a risk management perspective when a company goes into bankruptcy to start limiting your risk, now if you're someone that that is super risk intolerant and it is going to bother you make me time to phase out that Marketplace because and and see what happens with the chapter 11 you can always come back and it when the risk is diminished so I would kind of you know. Figure out your risk tolerance a spectrum of hey I go bungee jumping off Bridges as a super sweet. Each risk for breakfast all the way to I don't own stocks I keep cash under my mattress and level and then apply that to to your. Your strategy for selling on Sears and also put it through a filter of materiality is is this more than 10% of your business or not. Jason: [38:38] Yeah that seems like totally Sound Advice I can't believe you you gave out my mattress strategy online though. Scot: [38:47] Yeah they will talk about inflation some other time. Jason: [38:51] Okay. Scot: [38:53] It's actually. Jason: [38:55] You know every time one of these is a significant retailer goes under there's always this question like who's going to benefit from them going under or what what's the impact going to be on the rest of retail you know Sears is still like a 10 billion dollar a year retailer in so that you know it today. Assuming they don't emerge from the realreal organization and and retain a significant portion of their. There are 10 million dollar Revenue run rate a bunch of other retailers are going to benefit. [39:31] The thing I like to point out is Sears has already donated most of its market share to the rest of the market so you know. There there was a time when they were 40 billion dollar retailer and they've been slowly a roading since 2006 and they probably have donated. Over a hundred million a billion dollars in in share to other retailers. Over these last 12 years or so and so you know the the bulk of. [40:03] The benefit of them going out of business like has already paid off two other retailers. And you know there's a lot of analysis that goes in a who's going to benefit most from these stores closing and you know who has favorable, merchandising categories that are similar to Sears who has similar geography to Sears to benefit from the. The specific store closures. But in general I think if you look at the macro Trends I I sort of have this premise that were really seeing a bifurcation of retail and where were essentially seeing. A few huge aggregators that focus on selling every product that's available in doing so at a really low price and super efficiently. And if that sounds familiar to you in North America and that's because I just described Amazon. There would be a good argument that Walmart is also one of those aggregators that that's going to continue to do well and in the future we might have a duopoly if he's too big. Big aggregators and then everyone else is in a really focused on selling curated assortments to specific. Target audiences and really selling exclusive products that you can't get from the big aggregators in so those big aggregators are. In the best position to benefit when. [41:24] You know someone else that used to win based on assortment and scale goes away so like obviously Amazon Walmart or. Going to take a significant percent of that share that Sears losses in Sears specific case because of a big portion of the revenue is soft goods at a low price point poles is particularly well positioned to. To get a nice benefit from the Sears stores going away and because appliances what a big chunk. Of Sears Revenue Best Buy is also in a position to get. A nice lift from the the the Sears market share lost so I think those are the retailers. Will see benefit the most but you know. At this point we're not losing the big one of the biggest retailers in America we're losing eyeshadow up there once was one of the biggest retards in North America so I don't think this is going to be a title change in the Retail Landscape by any means I think you know it's more sad because of. The history of Sears and what a dominant position they want had and how important they were to the evolution of retail in North America and frankly in many ways how important they were to the actual development of North America. Scot: [42:41] Anderson so you can take off the mattress all the money from of your mattress and put it. It sounds like. Jason: [42:48] That probably would be far from the worst investment I ever made. Scot: [42:53] What will save that story for a future ship so that's that's good perspective now tell us about this whole Universal Postal Union treaty and what's going on. Jason: [43:07] So this is a very little known thing that suddenly is getting a lot of ink so you know back in 1874 at the treaties burn the world establish this thing called the universal Postal Union later got rolled into the to be sort of a subsidiary of the United Nations and then the idea of this poster 3D was that every country you would agree to uniform rates for postal delivery so when you're in France and you want to mail something to Germany you could know in advance what the cost would be to mail that and the cost ought to be, the same for mailing between every country and each because that mail requires the, cooperation of at least two Postal Services the one that picked up the package from you and hands it to that that foreign country and then that terminal country that the country that gets it and has to deliver it. [44:11] They ate their handling of that package the treaty agreed on how those two postal entities would share the the rates for that shipment and they agreed that that the international shipments would get equal trip treatment with domestic shipment so if the. Is the terminating country you know couldn't for example deliver International Post much slower or less reliably or with West tracking are these kinds of things. [44:44] And so it sort of made it very easy and possible for 4 people all over the world to mail things to each other and know in advance how how much it was going to cost and have pretty good confidence that it was going to get delivered and then overtime this treaty added some other useful things they added some standards like a big stamp should be they added electronic data interchange so that the the Post Oak interchanges could be more efficient and they added some you know things to catch fraud and crime and and share databases and things like that so so we've all had benefited for a long time from the Disposable 3D it's got a hundred and ninety-three member countries in it now. [45:26] So if I feel like that's that's good for the world it's super important in a lot of e-commerce. Pretty good cross-border e-commerce still gets delivered via the post office so there's a lot of artists that make beautiful art here in the US and they sell it to people in Europe in the primary way they deliver that is. They mail it via post a post so the one sort of real challenge is, did there was a clause built into this postal treaty that essentially said developing nations, would get charged less terminal fees. And so what that essentially said is more developing poor or countries would not have to pay as much to have their their post delivered by richer countries and so if you're in one of these more developed countries you are obliged to accept packages at a lower cost from a developing country and if you lost money delivering that the way you would have to make up that money is by charging the people in your home Market. More for postage and like there's probably a good argument that that. [46:43] That mechanism for developing countries was probably fair and had some benefits and made it easier for more countries to participate in the treaty, one of those countries that was flagged as a developing country was China. And the treaty is super slow and it takes a long time to change like I think there's not a good argument that China should still be considered a developing economy for purposes of this treaty but but they were and so what that essentially meant is that a seller in China could sell something on Amazon to it to a buyer in the US and they could very cost-effectively, male that that good via post and frankly it was much cheaper to send something from Shanghai to San Francisco then it was to send something from Chicago to San Francisco and ironically that that seller in Chicago selling the San Francisco was having to pay a higher postal rate to subsidize that cheap delivery from that Chinese seller so treated this really unfair situation where Chinese sellers had a much lower cost of postal delivery for cross-border trade then did for example American companies and so a lot of people felt that was unfair and so now the Trump Administration is threatening to pull out of the treaty, because of that that fundamental unfairness which frankly totally agree is unfair the problem is. [48:13] If we do in fact pull out of the treaty. What that also means is that all those sellers in the US that want to ship via post anywhere else in the world can only do it if the United States negotiates a individual treaty with a country you want to ship your goods to sew. [48:30] That that potentially would mean we need a hundred and ninety-three postal trees that we have to negotiate one and one with each of these countries, many of those countries we don't have an ambassador with right now so I guess it would be a big Challenge and so while I think pulling out of the upu fixes this this. Fairness imbalance with China it's going to create a bunch of new headaches for people in the US that do cross-border trade and so what you know frankly the best out come here and what what I think a lot of his hope is the case is Milli by threatening to pull out of the upu we could put. Pressure on the the governing bodies of the upu to sort of fix this this China Gap to keep us in the treaty and so hopefully this is just some sabre-rattling it causes them to rethink the developing nation clause and we stay in the treaty but if we do pull out that'll be you no good news for some people that are competing with China but it'll be bad news for a bunch of other US base sellers. Scot: [49:32] One of the companies that seems potentially most impacted is wish so Bocas wishes Marketplace are Chinese sellers Supervalu oriented so they're not using FedEx or anything like that they are using the postal system and the wish founder was actually kind of saying to you earlier point about it is kind of ironic that. By raising the postal rates it actually kind of helps Amazon versus other retailers that this is another interesting kind of example actually oddly benefit Amazon because you know now there won't be the goods from wish that you're competing with Amazon isn't the middle sister where they bring products are from China on boats called Dragon Boat so it'll have to get a lot of their goods they skirt this this this just don't understand how that works correctly. Jason: [50:25] Yeah. You're exactly right and this is again the biggest sellers I actually have more options right and so even and I don't know how true this actually is Betty wish claims that hey this isn't going to be you know to join material to us because we are selling enough stuff from China to the US that we can be a cost-effective freight forwarder so we can put all those small packages on our on boats bring containers over here and then dump them in the US Postal System to be delivered domestically and not have international right and because we're a big seller we have enough volume to aggregate to do that where as you know smaller sellers wouldn't wouldn't have that option so remains to be seen whether which will be able to follow through on that if we pull out of the upu treaty but like certainly it's your point Amazon. [51:16] Already doing that and there was a I think Jason Delray did an interview with the CEO of wish and he had a funny comment like when the the Diplomat talk about pulling out of the UVU one of the reasons they say it is it's totally unfair the US Post Office is losing three hundred million dollars on. On postage as a result of this deal and the wish CEO offered to pay it and obviously like that's not the the total cost that's lost from from this this imbalance but it I thought it was a funny snide remark. Scot: [51:57] Hearing you describe it almost could be an eBay proxy on eBay benefits from a lot of this stuff too so it'll be interesting to watch that and then in the world that talk a lot about ePacket do you know what that is and if it's a fact about us. Jason: [52:12] Yep like so that is a specific postal product and it if I'm remembering right it's indexed to the upu rates but it's not actually governed by the upu rate so it would be possible for us to change the ePacket rates without pulling out of upu but it would require the US Post Office to change some of their their pricing policies and I think that might require a vote of Congress if I'm if I'm not mistaken so it's a a slightly special case but it basically is indexed to the rest of this problem. I'm so it's all it's all going to be interesting to watch like I never thought I would get a chance to talk so much about the nuances of international postage systems. I think my my father-in-law the stamp collector would really enjoy it. [53:09] And that's going to be a great place to wrap it because it's happen again we've used up all our a lot of time as always if we got anything wrong or are you have further questions or want to discuss anything from Today Show would love it if you jump on Facebook and leave us a comment will try to reply right away as always if you benefited from the show now would be a great time to jump over to iTunes and give us that 5-star review if you hate it today show Scott's a personal cell phone number will be in the show note so you can give him a call and let him know. Scot: [53:44] Absolutely look forward to hearing from everybody thanks for joining us everyone have a great week. Jason: [53:49] And until next time happy commercing.

EP099 - Tulip Retail CEO Ali Asaria and News Amazon News Wholefoods - Amazon Day 1 buzz Amazon getting deeper into programmatic ads Amazon building a FC on top of what was once the largest mall in the US, in Randall, OH Amazon is #1 app with millennials via Comscore Other news CPG's face the threat of digital disruption Warren Buffet - Retailers and Brands in an epic battle Walmart partners with Google home (See Scot on the Today Show talking about it here) Digital Retail Newsmaker Our Digital Retail Newsmaker segment, features an interview with Ali Asaria (@aliasaria), CEO and Founder of Tulip Retail. Tulip Retail is a mobile application provider focused on empowering workers in retail stores.  They recently raised $40M in venture capitol, lead by Kleiner Perkins.   Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 99 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, August 31th 2017. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at SapientRazorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. New beta feature - Google Automated Transcription of the show: Transcript Jason:  [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show, this is episode 99 being recorded on Thursday August 31st 2017 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingull. Scot:  [0:41] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason you know what I got 99 problems and are podcasting ain't one. Jason:  [0:49] I'm sorry to hear about your other problems but I'm super excited we're about to have the Y2K of our podcast. Scot:  [0:56] I know you'll have to see what happens when we go triple digits this whole thing could fall apart on us. Jason:  [1:00] My naming conventions for our audio files way up with iTunes like everything's going to break. Scot:  [1:07] Don't tell me that I'm actually legit right now. Jason:  [1:10] I didn't mean to make you nervous I've actually I programmed everything at three three digit so until we get to 1000 we're good. Scot:  [1:16] I'd Optical you have been on the road as per usual and I think you were most recently up in Boston tell us what's going on in that part of the world. Jason:  [1:27] Yeah yeah I've been traveling light I'll be on the road I think almost every day this month, and I was in Boston this morning and yesterday which is a great retail City I was meeting with a couple of clients and some of my colleagues but one store in particular I had been meaning to get to that I finally got to, is the ministry of Supply Flagship in Boston and is in a retailer and what's pretty cool is. They have a make on demand. Wool Blazer machine in the store so you you can figure an order your Blazer. And they literally knit it in the store on demand. [2:12] So it's kind of you know which is definitely a potential potential future Evolution for a lot of retail is kind of you know. The Maid to Order personalized products at Masco and and pushing manufacturing out to the edge and all these things and you know. [2:30] In the distant future we might have a lot of this manufacturing capability in our homes but for many years before we have that. It'll make sense to be putting it into retail store so it's just think it's kind of interesting concept to watch. I saw them sell a couple sweaters while I was there and definitely not a perfect experience at the moment I think it takes about 3 hours to knock out one of these sweater so you're you're ordering it you're leaving the store to do some more shopping and then coming back later that day to picking up. Scot:  [2:58] Because you don't just stand there and robots kind of so it on to you Westworld style or that's not how it works. Jason:  [3:04] That would be awesome that will be a future version no it's a pretty big machine that looks like a fancy 3D printer it's pretty funny fun to watch. And what's interesting you'd almost expected the like that it would be a little gimmicky in that the product want to be that good but it's actually it's a stylish wool Blazer and it's like a. [3:25] The the Yarns are like high-tech wool it's like an athletic performance wool so it's like it's intended to breathe and Wiccan and you know it's it's meant to be convenient travel garment that. That look stylish but but doesn't make you too hot and sweaty. Scot:  [3:45] Call how do they get your body measurements with a Kinect kind of a thing. Jason:  [3:49] So they are not doing like a 3D scanner for the body measurements they the measure you the old-fashioned way with a. A tape system but one of the disappointments is they are not custom making the sizes yet so they do they measure you but they measure you to figure out which of the standard sizes they'll make you. So you can custom pick the colors. And some options and things like that but you can't for damn pole say I want 2 more inches in the in the Chester's or shorter sleeves or something like that which. Seems like a obvious thing you'd want and expect in a made-to-order garment. Scot:  [4:26] Is there some complexity around like making it kind of fit right and back on stuff. Jason:  [4:32] I think it's it's early like I think this is intended to be a permanent machine there some other versions Adidas is done one of these with sweaters and it was sort of a pop-up shop in Berlin for a couple months this is intended to be a permanent fixture in the store. But I think you know we're seeing generation one of the experience and I think they've said that there. They're you know going to see what customer adoption is like and and eventually expand to make door sizes. Scot:  [4:56] Thankful well thanks for the trip report and, one thing I want to talk about is it's tomorrow is force Friday and for this is like a Star Wars Insider thing but before they do the movies the first wave of merchandise comes out that's called Force Friday, so I'm actually making a huge sacrifice I am forgoing Midnight Madness for Force Friday to be on the podcast here tonight far listener so that's how much I care about her listeners Jason I'm willing to give up a little bit Star Wars action. Jason:  [5:30] I am super grateful I hope you don't miss anything super valuable by not being a right at midnight but I've actually I feel like there's been a lot of things pulling on your, testing your dedication to the podcast is that I don't know of our listeners are aware of this but we we actually had to delay the recording of last week's podcast because you are a celebrity appearing on The Today Show. Scot:  [5:53] I wouldn't say I was a celebrity it was just kind of one of those things aligned much like an eclipse and I was I was able to be on the Today Show it was kind of fun so got to talk about, it's funny I'm sure you've done these things where you talk for 30 minutes about something and they use like a 10-second snippet but I talked a lot about it we'll talk about it later in the show, the tie between Walmart and Google so they were looking for experts couldn't find anyone I guess you were traveling and they ended up finding me so and I was the one guy that answered his phone I like 9:30 at night. Jason:  [6:27] Is funny they actually called me first and they had me send a picture and then they got the picture and said you know what you have a face for podcast we're going with Wingo. Scot:  [6:36] Applebaum was funny the only wall we had at Channel visor that had the logo where the camera can fit in Halogen orange wall and it made me look like a Oompa Loompa so that was exciting. Jason:  [6:48] I'm glad you noticed that because I did but I felt that it want to bring it up unless you. Scot:  [6:52] Everything's I have like spray on tan but that that's not the case. Jason:  [6:57] Yeah I have to be honest I feel like that was shoddy work on the cameraman like I feel like they could have fixed that. Scot:  [7:02] Well you know they don't have the professional crew like we do here at the Jason Scott show. Jason:  [7:07] Exactly the audio engineer on the Jason Scott show would never let you sound Orange. Scot:  [7:12] A couple other quick things for get into it the, as a recording this we found out today that September 12th is the big day when Apple's going to announce something which we all know is going to be the iPhone 8 so that's going to be exciting and I'm sure they'll be some e-commerce implications we have a couple of things tonight we'll talk about, and then I'm going to cook Commerce on September 13th to 14 really just as a spectator to come look and see what they're doing I'm super excited they're doing a tour of a prime now facility so I look forward to reporting back to letters on what I see there, if any lister's are at that event and want to connect shoot me a note on Twitter or LinkedIn or where. Jason:  [7:53] And it's adorable that you think you're going to go there without me because I of course will be the one sitting next to you. Scot:  [7:59] Bloom I wasn't sure if you're going make it that's exciting. Jason:  [8:01] I am I am having to take a red-eye from a client obligation on the west coast so I might be a little sleepy but hopefully they're there will be a Starbucks in Manhattan that I'll be able to find. Scot:  [8:11] I'll be waiting there with a Trenta for you so that you're ready to get refueled and and hit the ground running. Jason:  [8:18] I totally appreciate it a side note on the world's best planned obsolescence like I thought you no one's expecting they're going to announce and iPhone 7S which might be available. Very soon after the announcement and the iPhone 8 that's going to be probably a pretty constrain product and might not be available for a month or two. After the announcement maybe that's the sort of common speculation and there's also a lot of speculation that they're going to launch a new Apple watch at the event and so they, Apalachee solve the problem for me you know what I was going to be sad cuz I'm going to want the aid and that means I'm going to have to delay gratification and wait to get it, but on the day they announced the announcement announce the announcement yeah I got off the plane and my Apple watch exploded. [9:03] The screen not an actual exothermic explosion but the screen flew off. So now I have a legitimate reason to buy the Apple watch so that'll that'll acute fulfill my my short-term gratification and then then the iPhone 8 will be my longer-term when I guess. Scot:  [9:21] Dump yard so Elon Musk doesn't call them explosions their violent release of atoms so that's what you're watching. Jason:  [9:29] Yes not as violent as some of his Rockets thankfully. Scot:  [9:34] Well Jason this time of year between summer and kind of the Fall is the crazy time in the world of digital retail cuz everyone's pushing out all the things they've been working at out for the since last holiday, and getting ready for this holiday season and true to Fashion it's been a crazy busy news week so let's jump into it and then, one thing for listeners to stay for years we have a new segment today it's called digital retail newsmakers and, that will follow a short update on the news and first thing we want to cover tonight is Amazon news. [10:25] Yes so the first thing that we have to cover here is we are kind of deep into this Whole Foods Amazon, integration so the sequence was Thursday last week was I believe the 23rd or 24th, Amazon sent out a press release saying we have received, that the transaction is going to close on Monday and here's some of the things were going to do, and that release itself really set the not only the internet on fire but also the stocks of the grocery companies so I saw that several of the main grocery companies were down 8%. And I thought it was funny because when they, that in the precious there was three or four bullets and it was almost a bullet for bullets list of the things you and I predicted on our Whole Foods Deep dive that we did right after the announcement. The quick take so pat on the back to us because I think we got most of the stuff right. Jason:  [11:29] Yeah yeah I feel pretty good and then one thing we, we did talk a little bit about on the show but the other thing a ton of people were predicting that there would be a lot of them Regulatory impediments and that that would slow down and that the government was going to look at it. Really closely and I think both of you and I discussed on the show and then did a bunch of Prince interviews where we we said that that was silly on that that this was going to. Not have any antitrust issues whatsoever and sure enough it it it got very fast approval. Scot:  [11:57] Yeah yeah and then so the day one activities were pretty impressive were you able to pop into Whole Foods on day one. Jason:  [12:04] I was and yet impressive is definitely the word the the speed at which they got so much done is truly impressive and scary to a lot of the folks that have to make a living competing against them. Scot:  [12:19] Yeah the so. The biggest one is price cut so they picked some of the most popular items and did some pretty substantial price cuts and and then kind of said more to come, this is nursing you know you're starting to see this kind of, you know you hear of this whole fake news and how the news media covers things in the political side of things but seeing e-commerce where. Yeah I saw some people report as much as 40% off and you know what day it done is just really kind of found two things that had been discounted and then didn't average that was one way of looking at it, and then the most conservative article I read said that it was only like 1% and what this person did as they took like. Every SKU in the store and. Including like that you know the 50 to 100 top sellers and then they just kind of looked at the math that way and that one's kind of the dinner some cuz it was clearly designed to get the worst results and it basically said well you know the prices have achieved more than 1% we checked. 10000 items and so I thought that was funny that it's clearly they they either had absolutely no idea how Commerce works or they were just trying to. Prove a point that it wasn't that big of a discount. Jason:  [13:33] Yeah I mean it it does go like there's an age-old problem with. Like tracking prices and you know everyone has a different basket of goods and and you know every basket is going to have a. A different outcome in so you know the most interesting studies are the ones that like pick a consistent basket of goods over a long period of time and then you can see. Ctrends. [13:57] But you know I just have to say like the fact that they got prices changed at all in my mind was super impressive and their brilliant about milking those price changes for for a huge amount of PR but just in general. They got a bunch of Amazon signage up in the stores they got a display in every store that was merchandised with a bunch of Echoes that were for sale. And you know they they they change prices on you know a hundred items that are you know likely price sensitive items that that people are paying attention to in generated a bunch of media that prices are lower in Whole Foods which is. Going to drive a bunch of extra traffic to Whole Foods weather. [14:40] Does customers particular baskets are lower or not so you look at all that that they got done on the first day that they took control of the store and you go you know man in a traditional grocery store that list of activities would take nine months to deploy. Scot:  [14:54] Yep and it goes even deeper so when the arrow kind of points from Whole Foods to Amazon so the things I saw they had you know a really good selection of Whole Food private label and that's called, whole 6330 another word for 365 and so that was on Prime now it was promoted categorized and you know the pricing seem to be pretty aggressive I didn't check exactly to the store but it seemed to match the, a couple things I saw on Main Amazon you had some things so that that was also an impressive that they got that done so quickly. Jason:  [15:33] Yep absolutely there they are just operating at a different speed than everyone else in and that you know should should really be a wake-up call if if you're you're planning to compete with them. Scot:  [15:46] Yeah nothing in the announcement that I thought we had talked about that a lot of people poo-pooed but is definitely happening like it's two things so number one they're kind of it's not a day one thing cuz there's an integration. Amazon Prime will become the whole food customer reward program and then, I know folks that have gone in and chatted and heard from cashiers that there will be an overall Prime discount to your entire basket. One cashier said 10% I have no idea how they're going to verify your Prime imagine maybe a mobile app or something but that's going to be interesting to watch roll out. And another one that you know is interesting in and unite talk about this kind of being able to, I think a lot of people are really obsessed with this are they going to just ship is going to become a shipping station and this kind of thing and actually the reverse was announced where Amazon's going to put Lockers in there so if you're going to Whole Foods you have some Amazon returns you bring them with you, I just told her to lock her and now you saved yourself a trip to the UPS store or whatever it is you need to drop those off. Jason:  [16:49] Yeah yeah bunch of the crazy things on day one and I'm sure we've only seen the first wave of the interesting integration so it's it's going to definitely be a fun one to watch. Scot:  [17:00] And then continue on the Amazon news11 tidbit I saw we've talked about this on the show or fair amount where you know I think the Amazon ad. Kind of opportunity is way bigger than people realize and there's a lot going on there so there's an article in digiday where they talked about. Not Amazon has really kind of opened up in within the Amazon Marketing Group AMG and AMS a lot of AP eyes that allow for more programmatic bidding so as you know being in the ad to yourself you know the. Biggest advertisers have these pretty complex things they want to do they want Total Control they want to be able to programmatically do things the first generation of the Amazon API would basically say or or Amazon's. Add technology basically said Mr Advertiser that's great but here's our little system this toy built you're going to have to use it yourself that really kind of delayed adoption so now when it comes to things like the bility to you spin up. Retargeting campaigns display ad campaigns and then search programmatic search kind of things they have a piece out there now that they are pretty actively. Getting into the hands of advertisers which eyemagine is part of a Q4 push to to really kind of dramatically grow that business so so that's pretty interesting and I still think that's probably the most underappreciated kind of. What could be another multibillion-dollar pillar for Amazon is is the the Amazon ad technology. Jason:  [18:32] For sure. Another interesting Amazon announcement partly because of the irony is that they announce their, a new fulfillment center that they are opening and the location is quite interesting because, they are taking over a 900,000 square foot mall and Randall Ohio so this is one of the very first. Indoor Regional malls close back in 2005 and you know there's a lots of Taco in the mall again and World about you know what. Scot:  [19:19] You think they really turn it into a cell phone I kind of envisioned I'm having a bold as it don't you think. Jason:  [19:25] Yeah the location yeah I think the I think Amazon's fulfillment centers are highly optimized I don't I don't imagine they would reuse the space. Scot:  [19:34] Yeah it's called it like a huge fulfillment center I think it's going to 800,000 square feet which Amazon's building of it like 1.5 21.9 now it's actually a small fulfillment center for Amazon. Jason:  [19:46] Yeah but I mean to put that inside that's a very typical sized you know Regional mall and so your point like a regional mall is a small Amazon fulfillment center. Scot:  [19:59] Yeah and then I think it's a nursing cuz I'll probably a lot of jobs inside of there too so I don't know what do you say so. Jason:  [20:05] I think they Dance 2000 people on day one. Scot:  [20:09] What is to do the math of the conversion rate for every dollar you lose in retail and how many employees does that and then what's it look like over at Amazon I think that would be a fun exercise will do a deep dive on it. Jason:  [20:21] Awesome are there is a lot of good dialogue around that Trends in in retail hiring and what happens with unit e-commerce Jobs go up as as brick mortar Jobs go down on all this or something so that be a great thing to deep diver. Scot:  [20:35] Another quick hit on amazon.com Square put out a pretty interesting chart I will put it in the show notes and what they did is they did one of their comps Corey studies with Millennials and they found that shocker Amazon is the number one app with millennials, and they asked interesting series of questions like you know what app would it be most hard to live without an Amazon came out on top of that, I and another interesting fact wait on that as you had Amazon it number one and then you had some Social Media stuff, Google was in there but it's kind of me okay third the size of of. Of Amazon it's just another maze data points that kind of shows that as people. A Amazon has become the de-facto kind of product search that the people look for and then be, as people look for products they are not really going to Google anymore they're going to Amazon. Jason:  [21:29] Yep and you know it that isn't surprising I've just done a bunch of consumer research on behalf of of some clients and you know one of the huge takeaways is is Amazon is just simply becoming a loved brand and. You know they're there an important part of the consumer's life they're not just a place to get stuff so it makes perfect sense that their app would be the. The sticky one of the top of the Heat. [21:57] I think there's also a lot of interesting not Amazon news this week. One of my favorites is there was an article in the Wall Street Journal this week talking about citing Warren Buffett and talking about. Retail and Brands being on a collision course. [22:18] And this was that super exciting for me because I have been that that is slide one in my my retail Trends presentation for the last 6 months so when. Warren Buffett agrees with me that's one of the rare occasions when I feel like I'm probably on to something. Scot:  [22:34] Call did Warren call you for advice on this. Jason:  [22:37] She did not but essentially like the the the spin here is. Retailers and brands have always been Frenemies that retailers have been trying to create their own private label brands. Forever but you don't allow the more recent Trends are the the stigma around private labels is going away and customers are much more happily adopting them and. As a result. National brands are losing their equities are losing their Equity you know stores are all getting Consolidated so the retailers have more power and from Warren's position who owns a lot of cpgs. You know you know what I think he's saying that the retail and brands are on a collision course and the retailers are winning. [23:26] Which which I certainly think is is possible in one sense I think the industry interesting thing we talk a lot like. These products retailers are making are no longer private labels like they're their National Brands the. Kirkland is the best sounding you know sells more on Amazon than they do on on Costco right like that's that's a brand it's not a a private label for Costco and you know that the Amazon Echo. Is it certainly not a private label product like it's it's the market-leading you know best ecosystem product in a space. So I certainly think that the trend is true I think it's beyond. Just private labels but one of the interesting subtext under this is the this article kind of echoed a lot of Articles have been in the news this this week. [24:21] The one one of my competitors in the space wpp announced servisoft Revenue quarter and you know people are making a lot of. Conversation around hey is advertising or digital advertising. Dying or weighing it looks like he's big big Ad Agency holding companies are starting to see soft soft sales so you know a lot of. People that care about me or asking you know if my curse in Jeopardy and I do think. That that we're seeing those kind those digital ads really start to wane like that. What I call interrupted rim and advertising like interrupting when someone wants to see in order to you know force-feed them this advertisement just. Is a decreasingly. Effective tactic and it's the the analog versions are less effective in the digital versions are less effective and I think you know our friend Scott Galloway like he calls advertising is increasingly becoming. Attacks that poor people pay any talks about all the. The the rapidly adopted ways that more affluent people are paying to avoid ads and you you get your your media from Netflix without ads and. You pay for ad blockers and he pay for subscriptions to you newspaper to get it without ads and said I feel like this traditional. Interrupter of an advertising is sort of dying and you know so agencies like mine or having to reinvent themselves to serve customers in ways other than advertising and and of course the. [25:53] The particular company I work for it doesn't really do that kind of advertising so so it doesn't particular dust. But the big article that came out that really triggered all this was about a week ago and it was marked picture who's the chief customer officer at P&G. And he announced that they had really concluded the digital advertising wasn't working and they were they were going to cut at least a hundred million dollars of their digital ad spend because it wasn't effect. [26:19] And that's interesting because I do think there's a strong Trend towards. [26:26] Eliminating some of this this interrupt driven advertising but I don't think that's the whole story of Procter & Gamble. Patrick gamble has some some some serious activist investors that are kind of in their shorts right now and you know there's a lot of pressure on them to cut costs and it really looks to me like. They just did a brain-dead analysis and some of their marketing activities and are trying to justify the fact that they're having to significantly curtailed their spending so you know their there they're doing like. [26:56] Kind of brain-dead last-click attribution on a on a whole bunch of marketing spend and just saying hey hey you know we don't anticipate sales are going to significantly go down when we. We stopped spending this this hundred million dollars but it you know it it really kind of. Doesn't feel like they they've done a very detailed analysis on how you know how, you have and how that media is or could be influencing sales in their wholesale partners and and you know they're there, they just seem really rudimentary on the metrics Mark Mark is like one of the most powerful guys in advertising and he spends all his time talking about, a metric called visibility like whether or not you can just see an ad, and wow it's super important that that that metric be right it seems like someone about 32 levels below Mark should be focused on that and someone at marks level should be a lot more focused on, how can I marketing tactics drive more profit for human and you know it just seems like, like tractor is kind of lost lost sight of that kind of view on on their digital marketing spend. Scot:  [28:01] Sold articles are nursing say think so Buffett and then also one of Sam Walton's descendants of sold quite a bit of Walmart stock, and it's just confusing cuz the Articles kind of time together but like you can tell the, the two events that happened separately in Warren Buffett's not really saying the reason I'm selling Walmart stock is because of this battle of between Brands and retailers but but it's interesting to because he's he's kind of. With his wallet he's buying Brad's and Son retailers but then he's kind of saying that he thinks retailers are winning that battle what's your. [28:38] Which kind of your view on that. Jason:  [28:39] Yeah I don't I agree he he I'm a less sophisticated investor than you but part of me feels like he has a very disciplined investment strategy, that you know is based on value investing and so you know in a market where the cpgs are losing power to the retailers are the retailers stocks becoming, yeah less likely to meet his value criteria and does he feel like if he can pick the the subset of winners among the cpgs that those are potentially better. Better value investment censored you know better fit his in his particular investment profile. [29:20] I don't know if that's true or not I was that's internally speculation on my part. Scot:  [29:24] Yeah it's it's a little confusing the way they time together but they're not really meant to be together. Jason:  [29:31] Yeah for sure it's going to be an interesting space to keep watching, I think we talked on the show it's going to be increasingly hard to make a living selling other people's stuff and so what you just are going to see is you know, retailers are going to start looking a lot more like Brands and Brands you don't going to have that retail distribution so they're going to have to start selling direct to Consumers and so they're going to start looking more like retailer so I definitely wouldn't we say collision course I think the two businesses are going to know start looking a lot more the same than different is as we progressed. Scot:  [30:02] I'm just glad that we have a little break from the mall again merkel's it's getting kind of a little old. Jason:  [30:08] Yeah and I don't think we have much of the data points but like, a bunch of surprisingly good earnings quarter this year so they're a bunch of companies kind of surprised us with some beats even if they're there future outlooks weren't particular promising. Scot:  [30:25] Yeah I think that's why actually had quite a strong quarter and surprise whilst reading. Jason:  [30:29] Yeah and and again though like had caution that that wasn't the new normal and then there's talk one way down to spite the fact they had a big beat. Scot:  [30:37] I mentioned it to the top of the show with the Today Show kind of live there but the other big news in e-commerce was Walmart in Google really kind of. Deeply partnering to effectively take on Amazon and yeah I think I think it's early to call this one but what's really interesting in this story to me is the whole, you know enemy of my enemy is my friend so you know here's two companies that have never really had, an alliance I'm aware of other than I'm sure Walmart's large Google Advertiser in that kind of thing really kind of aligning and saying, hey you know we need to create a counter to this this Amazon kind of meth it's growing and and figure out what we can do there it's interesting too cuz Google has always play this kind of you know, we're neutral we just in traffic to all the different retailers we don't have a favorite retailer but it's starting to sound like Walmart is one of their favorite retailers. Jason:  [31:35] Yeah and I mean you know you think of that like it's it's increasing in the case that Amazon's big competitors are are these platform Echo Systems more so than. Then other retailers and so you know that that puts them much more odds with Google and Facebook than it does Walmart so it's interesting you note. Google and Facebook have some monetization problems versus Amazon's model in so you don't Google Plus Walmart feels like a more valuable. Competitor to the to the Amazon Echo System and I think you called it but like one of the most interesting parts of that announcement is not that hey you can order Walmart excuse. Through Google home, it certainly is interesting and by the way Walmart's up till like 67 million skus now so there you know it's a pretty pretty deep assortment, but the most interesting thing is Walmart is sharing first-party data with Google and so what would that lets Google do is. You know have much better inside and what you purchased in the past and be much more predictive so that your your voice experience can be much more impressive in its going to accurately guess. What size Campbell Soup you buy or what size Ruffles potato chips you buy and so they they get that SKU right cuz you know voice. Ordering becomes a disaster when they don't have good data about you and have to guess which of the hundred variance you might you might be interested in buying. Scot:  [33:03] Yep another quick one that I saw is so so. [33:10] Google shoppings at ad unit is called Product listing ads and saw that they are running a new pill a ad unit usually the way this works is you go to Google you search for, you know I don't know. Screwdriver or power drill or whatever and that's you see a bunch of those products from multiple retailers we saw unit that effectively was kind of a retailer take over so you would search for, I think the one we found with some office supplies at the Go staplers and they had, The Container Store where you could just kind of say as a user you would only see Container Store Staples in the ad unit and then there would be the same number of kind of, products with in there so that was kind of nursing not in a Google test tons of things all the time that we're always looking for new ones so I thought that was kind of interesting single retailer ad unit, that we hadn't seen before I will put a link to that in the show notes as folks are interested in learning more. Jason:  [34:03] Yeah that's toy interesting another one we saw was that the target. It seems to have moved off of AWS and that that's interesting for a couple reasons listeners World member about a month ago, Walmart launched too aggressive initiative we're not only did they say will not use AWS but we're encouraging any vendors that that's support us to not use AWS and now you see, Target moving off of AWS like the the obvious impetus for all of this is. These retailers don't need to be paying money to a competitor that that competitor can then use to develop new products and offerings, they make them you know more competitive with Amazon and so so you know this is always been, kind of the case but I think it's it's becoming much more apparent that retailers are recognizing it's foolish for them to use any Amazon Services even if their services than aren't competitive because they're all of course. Supporting and funding. Efforts that are competitive so if your Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud platform like, you know this is probably great news for you you got you know a lot of retailers are, are modernizing their it infrastructure and moving to the cloud and increasingly it's clear that the one category in the world that's not going to adopt AWS as the dominant Cloud platform is going to be the retail one. Scot:  [35:34] Cool and I know we're up against time we want to make sure we have room for a newsmaker but you know long time Lester's will know we are very enthralled with augmented reality and virtual reality and there's a bunch of news there. So I put it on my Star Wars hat one of the ones that was exciting is as part of the retail launch day of of this Force Friday they have added an AR functionality to the Star Wars app. I know the way this works is you go to your retailer and there will be a display there and you hold up the AR app to a QR code like thing and then there's a Star Wars character that appears in virtual reality or augmented reality that you can see. Did you can take pictures of them and collect them so one of the clever things they've done is there's something like. 20 characters 15 to 20 characters so as Star Wars people you kind of try to collect these things and let's say you're going to Walmart on tomorrow on Force Friday, well they're going to rotate characters to characters you see over the next four or five days will be different so they're kind of using this this virtual kind of technology to draw people, back to the stores versus just having him come in one time so I thought that was kind of interesting marriage of of the Two Worlds that we like there. Jason:  [36:48] Yeah I am not surprised at all that you are the earliest adopter and I'm excited to give it a try myself another interesting AR. [37:00] Milestone is this week both Google and apple release their variance of AR kits, which are essentially their api's for developing AR & VR but mainly AR experiences in their mobile phones and this is a huge deal, Google this had some AR technology called Tango, but it was really restrictive it only worked on very specific Hardware configurations and now Google is released this AR kit which works, on the majority of Google Hardware out there so it already works out over 100 million devices apple is released a kid that's works on basically all the. The Apple devices that can run the current operating systems in this is really likely to usher in. A huge crop of new you know highly functional AR apps in the. In the app stores like you look at a successful Arab like Pokemon go in the developers had to develop it on themselves and now you're getting. Napi from from the hardware manufacturer that that is much more robust and higher performance and. And takes the burden off the programmer to do all that so we've talked a lot on the show about. How AR apps are going to be important part of retail and you know that the availability of these api's is is definitely going to be a catalyst for seeing one of those so I'm excited to see what comes. Scot:  [38:24] Yeah I'm kind of seen some indications that there's e-commerce is a category that they're really interested in and, I think Ikea is a lunch partner and you know it'll be interesting to see, I'm imagining so apples really excited about this we couldn't event coming up in a couple weeks you know what if we had a retailer on stage I don't think that's ever happened where we had a retailer on stage kind of talking about new technology, let me nursing to watch and see what the retail implications are. Jason:  [38:55] For sure and I akea is the perfect lunch partner cuz they're one of the retards that went to the work to program their own custom AR app. I'm the day already had so it will eyemagine it was super easy for them to sort of adopt and expand it to use the new new kits. Scot:  [39:11] Yep in the last little tidbit so company when we did our deep dive on a rvr that we talked a lot about is magically. And I belong away depend for their headset was released today or are at work it's off to the patent pipeline so that's definitely an interesting read if you're into this whole world, there's there's, the air BR world is please pretty split on this a lot of people think this company is really kind of you know never going to ship something and that it's really vaporware and other people feel like maybe they're getting pretty close now this patents up. Jason:  [39:44] Yeah yeah for sure I'm eager to find out more let you know they've had some patents on the kind of underlying technology before this Pacific patent is actually about. The wearable glasses version and at least you know the Pak patent makes it feel seem like. They expect to be able to build a pretty lightweight convenient device. That that might be consumer-friendly and and that's interesting cuz a lot of people have feared that the technology you know like the prototypes of the moment the smallest one is a pretty heavy backpack. [40:17] So the fact that they think they can build it into assetto eyeglasses is is very encouraging and so with that we should. Turn to our next topic is Scott mentioned earlier tonight we are trying a new segment that we're calling digital retail newsmakers so what we're going to do is pick interesting companies in the e-commerce ecosystem, it has an interesting recent news and talk to the folks involved to get the inside scope, so Scott who is this week's digital retail news maker. Scot:  [40:57] Will Jason on August 22nd which was last Tuesday Kleiner Perkins which is one of the bluest of Blue Chip Venture Capital firms out there announced a 40 million dollar investment in Toronto based. Tulip. And here's the kicker all these headlines about Molly getting all the buzz around e-commerce Amazon Etc while read about store closures, tulip is not an e-commerce company but it really focuses on providing a mobile application platform to store associates that are in. Source so we are really excited to have alyas area live from Toronto he is the CEO of tulip retail with us here tonight. [41:36] Thank you so much for having. [41:38] Sure sure before we jump into it I wanted to bring up kind of a beef I have with you I was a very early Blackberry user, and from because I was on the BlackBerry from definitely like 2000 2007-2008 super pretty heavy user I think I've got all the way from the little kind of. Pager kind of form to the bigger ones and my favorite app was brick breaker breaker which I learned that you had some kind of a involvement in tell us the backstory on that. Yes it is quite a backstory but it's funny cuz like for a lot of my career I always always get introduced as the guy who created Brick Breaker and now it's funny cuz it's times past, what does time passes lesson bus people remember that game and sometimes. Recapture to be like the excitement that was created from that that one out that I created that was on that one more time so I'm like a hundred and fifty million mobile. [42:34] Yeah they were calculated the hours consumed done on your brick breaker. Oh man there's actually so many articles written about how much wasted time has been like that has been lost like from even likes to senior people like that I think the former president Obama used to be a big player I feel sort of guilty about it but not too. Jason:  [42:50] You are single-handedly responsible for lowering our GDP. Scot:  [42:54] Even ready to be at least I could you imagine the numbers on that. Jason:  [43:09] So obviously we have hinted at part of your background but Allie for listeners that don't know you why don't you give us the the recap of what your background is and how you came to tulip. Scot:  [43:22] Yeah so I mean my background is I mean I studied Computer Engineering at University called Waterloo here in Canada and I was really focus on Hardware that time and I got this new job at this. It's relatively new company called blackberry and started working there and wherever and eventually work there full time. But quickly I mean after I graduated University I I felt like I had to start something so I started this company I mean about 10 10 11 years ago. Caldwell. Yay and it was literally just me in a closet. I'm trying to build an e-commerce site from scratch I rode by wrote the code myself and I was packing the boxes myself and then we'll does he agree to what is now like one of the largest e-commerce companies in Canada, in that process it for the beanie Mike rewrite I literally like when I started well that's yeah I didn't know anything. About retail about merchandising about Warehouse Logistics and vendor management Ida learn all that from scratch as an engineer. And then that kind of led me to do what I'm doing now is building software for retailers having dinner retailer for a big part of my career. [44:20] What tell us more about well. CA what did what did you sell there. Better inside your Pharmacy and eventually groups of being what's I would describe it maybe it's like diapers.com for Canada so it sells everything from baby to Health and Beauty it's kind of largest largest company in Canada in that category online. Get it sounds like it's still operational so is that something you sold or or what how did you know what was the end result that. It was kind of interesting so I was the CEO up to about 4 years ago and at that time. Rebuilt how much software there that I actually went to the board and I said hey look there's a ton of value here I want to step down as a CEO of this retailer so that I can build a software company out of all this, great engineering that we have here and the potential for it and so to actually started with me you know promoting, who is Dennis to out who is now the CEO of so that I can step down and pull out a lot of the IP and that's that's how we begin, tulip with me kind of saying there's actually made me more value in this softer than there isn't any in the rest of the pictures. Jason:  [45:28] Very cool, and I guess I don't know if irony is the right words got always correct me with when I use bad diction but the wheel that CA is if as I understand it is is premature play, e-commerce site and then it seems like the biggest play for tulip is is is clearly an omni-channel pitch. Scot:  [45:52] Yes it's got me this is kind of the irony of my career but I think maybe a lot of lessons make sense right is that it's so much of my life was focused on trying to. Compete with physical retailers by building an online, retailer in love and in that process I was competing with all these retailers that I eventually build relationships with and so I would I would know all the folks at companies like Toys R Us that we now work with and some of the other folks and. What I started to realize was that what the thing that I think a lot of us know but it have any figured out how to really capitalize on which is. 90% of retail still happens inside these places called physical stores and there's so much opportunity there but it feels like 90% of the Innovation is all happening on that on the comp side only on the outside. My career is now about kind of trying to take all of that Innovation that I learned that I originally deployed Annie, try to replace that inside storage. [46:46] Cool so so 4 years ago you started tulip in when did you know you wanted to kind of go the store router was it kind of you edited there in somewhere. Yeah we started right away saying that stores matter and there's a massive opportunity there but I don't think we knew exactly what we were going to do there. The journey from me really sad was with me sitting with a bunch of big retailers that I built relationships with over the years and saying like help me understand what are your biggest challenges. And what I started to learn like just by sitting on the floor inside the stores and talking to heads of stores was that. It's really hard to innovate inside physical retail because they're stuck with these old green screen like you don't point-of-sale terminals that were built in the 1980s and the culture of stores and so difference and there's like one of our retailers has 40,000 employees there, all we know part-time and high turnover and so you're in this world where they're so much. The man from customers to innovate on their retail experience but when you're a retailer front operate these like very complex businesses it's really hard to adapt with the software in the technology that we have right now and so I was just like hey this is all opportunity this is a, big tough scary but big opportunity and so that's kind of what we went on. [47:57] Got it so so soon I'm an e-commerce guy and I don't know much about stores which would be a good assumptions give me kind of the elevator pitch for for tulip. Diane and why stores need to use this. 90% of retail is happening inside physical stores but I think the part that we forget is when we say. What's happening in physical stores it's happening with real human beings going up to other real human beings called store associates and buying through them and so you have this large job it's actually the largest job in North America I didn't know that, retail store associates of job which is never had tools before so we've all experienced customers. Frustration of going into a big retail chain and try to talk to a store associate that looks like they just were hired the day before and they can't answer basic questions that. You was a consumer can answer on your own phone right I can I can sometimes look up inventory an answer more complex you know product questions on my own phone and I would expect a store so she filled answer answer the opportunity to realize. Give this massive massive job category that's never had gray tools before. What happens if we actually gave them the tools to be able to answer customers questions and pull up inventory from other channels and help people transact across you, and in-store regardless of where that product is. Well if we could do those things. Maybe there's a potential lift and in the sales that we can do inside stores and that was the theory when we started we had no idea like at the massive opportunity and in the lift that we could create once we once we did and that's kind of where all the success companies come from. Jason:  [49:32] Perfect that you know we we used to make the joke like for a longtime store associates weren't even you know a common rule in a retail store was it store associates couldn't even use their own phone in the store. Scot:  [49:44] I work with these folks right so now I sit on the floor sorry but I mean I'm sitting on the floor with these door so I started to see the other side of it. Open very young people who know how to use technology cuz now everybody knows how to use a phone but they're so frustrated because they can't get access to basic information sometimes the only computer they have is the point-of-sale terminal so if there's people checking out. There is nowhere for them to, research information sometimes they're using their own retailers like mobile app because that's all they have and so I feel for these folks now and I didn't even though maybe in my previous career I used to kind of make fun of them because I see now what it's like being on the floor inside a story you want to help customers we don't have tools rent. Jason:  [50:24] Oh yeah it's it's believe me it's it's a difficult job and we you know and like originally doing all these rules, we are nobody wanted the sales associates to have more technology cuz frankly everyone was afraid they'd be playing brick breaker on it all day long and not talking to customers so I guess there's some irony there, but the the you don't when customers started walking in with their own phones and having all this information in the sales people are completely unequipped we used to talk. About you know the sales associates were essentially bringing a knife to a bazooka fight like it was. Totally asymmetrical so makes perfect sense to start equipping those the sales folks. You you can help me as an advocate a little bit because it is you may know from listening to show Scott doesn't really get the value of retail store so you know Scott. Scot as a drum in his office called retail Mulligan and and he just constantly beats it. [51:22] And you don't Infernus him like there are in fact a lot of stores closing and there are in fact, actor water stores facing some headwinds but I just beat you know curious what what's your general like so you know your future is tied to the future of the store's what what what do you think's going to happen to physical retail. Scot:  [51:41] I think you can see I'm a little biased because I bet my career in my entire company on that idea that stores matter right but I think like from our perspective right like you're seeing is right we see a lot of the retailers we work with right now, as tulip enters into the retailer to start our work with them. The head of stores has been mandated to close 10% of the stores but increase sales by 15% in those in the remaining store and so what's I think what's happening I think we're all seeing as that, even if the shift towards like you know you, goes from 10% to 15%. There's still a massive number of transactions that were going to continue to happen inside the stores in a space where there's like three trillion dollars retail transactions in North America and so you have a massive massive category on the other hand. You know 5% shift online means lots of jobs lost and so. The world in which tulip lives is we're working with me Taylor's that are saying yes stores will have to close and we have to correct for them the right number stores for the remaining ones. Bad experience that we drive for those customers we need we really need to up our game and it can't just be by. Lowering prices or in a fighting on trying to not have Amazon have access to the channel it's got to be about creating a differentiable experience inside stores at customers. Actually want to come to and that's kind of the world in which tulip plants ring. Jason:  [53:02] It makes perfect sense I'll just eat like the customer behavior is fundamentally changed as a result of. These digital tools that they've now become accustomed to and you know one of the big examples we always use his ratings and reviews to become super important for customers and making decisions, but none of those digital tools are available in the overwhelming majority of stores writing so you know a super common problem for a retailer is what is the in-store digital experience that, brings all those digital amenities to the The Shopper that they become accustomed to from their online shopping, and most of the answers to that question are inconvenient like they're they're super expensive and very hard to maintain and you know, digital signage and digital fact tags and you know there's there's a lot of baggage attached to doing everything on the customer's mobile phone and having him be kind of heads down in your store and by the way it's super hard to get the customer to download your mobile app anyway so they're all these these headaches and, it it it seems like providing the the sales associate which is the one variable in the store you can control. With access to these digital tools to use on behalf of the customer or with the customer seems like one of the the best solutions to that problem. Scot:  [54:17] Right I think you see that right when people talk about the, the end of stores you look at something like the Apple store right be like apples in this position where they don't have to open physical stores but they continue to open them and they're doing phenomenally well right and so I think we see this world in which like another we work with examples right bonobo started online. Did really well and then started opening physical stress you see all these like these folks were doing well online still opening stores but the stores feel very different, in terms of experiences it's different, how you drive a perfect experience for a customer, device they can share that with a customer cuz they know that to the customer that matters but in addition to that they'll also pull up pricing from other retailers write a big part, the selling process for some of our some of the rituals we work with his saying. Are you afraid that this product is cheaper on Amazon let's go to Amazon together and look at that price because they know that the customers thinking in the back of their heads. Jason:  [55:15] Well so of all the sort of features that can exist on that tulip tablet you know I'm imagining things like inventory information product information you know customer, Behavior information although sorts of things I get is there one one experience that you feel like. Is the overwhelming leader I would just be curious I once they sings Get deployed like what's the the most go to feature for for the majority of sales associates. Scot:  [55:42] Yeah there's there's basically two big experiences that we drive that usually Drive the most left right. The first one is on the channel selling so that's the ability for the store associate to say, whether or not the product you're looking for is in the store in front of us right now I can sell you any product from online and in the store in one basket and so that's that's key for that for a lot of the details who can't carry all of their inventory at one location. Does the second big thing that we do which is really interesting cross we learned a lot about her last years was is what's called clienteling and basically. Try and retailer on a lot of their business but like a significant percentage of the business for a lot of the best high-end luxury retailers happens through these one-on-one interactions that they have with customers and so a lot of a tulip does in that case. Is we help retailers write personal email text or says it's my personal emails during SMS messages to their best customers saying. Hey this just came in I thought it would look right with that thing that you bought before I put these these three items together and putting them on hold for you at a building that really one on one relationship that you can only get with that with a great tool plus a great store. [56:46] Awesome and so you mentioned but no bus which I guess now you get to count Walmart as a customer it's always nice to upgrade took like 5 minutes to switch that logo. What are some of other retailers that are utilizing your technology. Able to talk about in class which is a big pig to play fetch 800 locations across America, one of our best customers Saks Fifth Avenue and that whole network of retailers that are associated with them in miles from specialty retailers like, Toys R Us to the bonobos to Chanel it's been it's been very interesting to see how different ringtones work. [57:31] Cool and then says I fell off and we're always love to hear the story to the extent you can tell it of fundraising you know it's pretty clear that you convince the the nice Folks at Kleiner, 10 fasting what you're doing so that they're they're Believers is this the first round of funding you've done and, you know what what's the point of you of some of the feces out there that are raised that are looking that you're talking to are they do you run into some of that are like. Stores what are those or are they all pretty open-minded to that that kind of pitch these days. Yeah I think that's like one of the tough kind of side effects to the rise of Amazon are all the challenges we talk about one more time trying to compete with Amazon that I think not everyone knows about it is that it is next to impossible to raise money right now. For a business that is in the econ category right well. See experience that a lot just because VC's are very well aware of how difficult it is to compete at scale when once you have to go head-to-head against Amazon. I'm in that same kind of, light when we started to if I started to talk to me season but when I wanted to do next and I just was told basically by everyone that I was crazy why are you going after this category that's. It's going to be massively shrinking and no by the way retailers are the worst customers and so hard to work with but we just felt like it was just too big of an opportunity and I think. A lot of the things that scare people but the category for me kind of indicated that there was actually something there that people have figured out cool. Jason:  [58:59] So you're one of the things that I'm curious about all the you mention for example the the customer follow-up use case and just maybe I would generic be caught like the clienteling use case. [59:13] Imagine there's a yes or two pads for all those sorts of things build that native functionality into to it and so then you know it's it's in your ekosistem in and all that sort of thing versus interfacing with all the other, tool that does big retailers you just mentioned. Likely already have in their ecosystem is like does to try to be a complete solution with everything integrated in one big killed base or are you having the interface with a lot of other retail systems and how's that working out. Scot:  [59:46] So I think that's probably the biggest challenge for building tulip is that we're working in a space where you cannot you can't go to a retailer. The size of the returns that we typically work with and say, hey please throw it all of the tens of millions of dollars you can vested in all of your big ecosystem and all of that you know that the side effects of what what those things are connected to because we want to swap it out for this other cool app which we just built and so if you look at two of it where anywhere, rather large company now, about half of the company literally just does Enterprise Integration since the typical project bras with a big retailer will take some time six months maybe more. Just integrate with 15/16 back-end systems everything from sap to IBM and all of the mixture stuff that they have so a lot of tulips kind of, way of working greenhouses to say hey we're going to work alongside all of the systems that you bought already and we're going to have meant them and replace parts of parts of them when you don't have the right system but we can't come in and say please swap everything out at least to start with. Jason:  [1:00:46] Sure sure what one other question I'm curious about the, kind of retailers that are sort of best suited like I'm of the opinion that no retailer is purely self-service or purely sales assistant that like almost every retailer. Spectrum of those too but there some some classes of retailer that are much heavier sales assisted. And obviously some of your early customers like I would put in that category but then you know there's huge swaths of retail that are mostly cell service and you mentioned your biggest appointment was Toys R Us I would think of them as a, mostly self-service environment so I'm I'm tears in my wrong that that you're a better fit in a sales assisted environment or what's what's the strategy there. Scot:  [1:01:33] So when we first started we said let's focus on retailers where sales associates really matter where, retail just saying the store experience and we want to act like it Ramon in Destiny's people that's the category we thought we do the best in we started getting contacted by grocery retailers, 7-Eleven type retailers in quick-service and all the sudden we started to realize that I think what we're going to see is that. I think personally that every single job in the cattle work like sales associates in Cashiers all of those jobs will have a mobile device in their hands as part of their job for some of the. Less service-oriented one those mobile devices will be focused on you inventory counting and more of the kind of back in tasks and more of the service books ones will be more about. The summit tools kind of very famous for out front and center you know sending emails to customers and helping with the I like product information but in the end I'm of the belief that. Every category retail is going to have to arm its associates with a mobile devices as part of their job that's just so the reality of the Next Generation Enterprise. [1:02:33] On until we started with a lot of these high-end folks but now we're we're going to be deploying with a lot of the three times that you would traditionally think of his being sales associate Focus. [1:02:42] Regal one so do you help stores with kannada omni-channel implementation so do you get involved with buy online pickup in-store and ship from store in that kind of stuff. Absolutely I think like. You know one of my my big beliefs in this in this industry is that we all kind of maybe did it to service to the industry by over focusing on the word omni-channel because. Two lot of the consumers and and practically from an experience this perspective I'm just held it really mean anything until you do something with it right and so it's more of a philosophy than it is an an an experience and so tulip ends up being kind of good thing you do after you realize how many shells important, super a lot of okay we want to build a cell across channels that's an omni-channel selling experience but to do that I need to actually give it tool to. Perform the sound and so tulip is basically everything we do is if I don't Channel but it's kind of its kind of maybe the post on me channel thing that you do. What day in matching would be hard and we struggle with us at chill advisory even on the digital side and, the store side just kind of blows my mind this maybe while you have half your company is on the integration, peace but you know that the buy online pickup in-store in the ship from store has really high failure rate and no one really publishes one but my guess is somewhere between 5 and 10% based on personal experience. And I can imagine you're only as good as the systems you're integ

We return after a year and a half long hiatus to talk about our first month with the latest Google hardware, including the Pixel XL, Daydream VR, and Google Home.

In this week's episode, we cover two topics: technology and the US presidential election, and a review of Google's three new hardware products: Home, Pixel, and Daydream View. Our first topic, which takes up a little over the first half of the episode, is this week's US presidential election. We do share our personal thoughts on the outcome briefly, but most of this segment is devoted to the role technology and particularly social media played in the election, and then the likely outcome of the election for tech policy. We specifically discuss trade, M&A activity and the media, net neutrality, and repatriation of overseas profits. Our second topics is our Question of the Week, in which Jan shares his first impressions of Google's Home, Pixel and Daydream View hardware, which he's been using for a while now. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each piece of hardware, as well as Jan's overall views on Google's first hardware efforts. We wrap up with our Weekly Pick, which this week is a camping stove recommended by Aaron. As usual, you'll find links to related material including where to find Aaron's Weekly Pick on the website at podcast.beyonddevic.es.

Google-Hardware reloaded: Während Stephan jetzt doch ein bisschen auf das Pixel-Phone spechtet, hat Michael bedenken zum Google-WLAN-Router. Der kann nämlich alle angeschlossenen Geräte an Google direkt weitergeben.rnrnDas Galaxy Note 7 kommt nicht aus den Schlagzeilen. Sogar die Ersatzgeräte gehen in Flammen auf. Samsung kapituliert. Die Fertigung des Geräts wurde eingestellt - die Firma warnt: Schaltet das Galaxy Note 7 aus. Für immer. Wir sprechen über den immensen Image-Schaden.rnrnDas "Internet der Dinge" kann auch ein ganz schöner Reinfall werden. Zum Beispiel dann, wenn man erst nach elf Stunden Wasser im "smarten" Wasserkocher aufheizen kann... Ein Appell.rnrnSplitter: Mafia (spielen) macht Spaß. Aufs iPhone warten nicht.

Auf vielfachen Wunsch gibts die #heiseshow von der IFA auch als Podcast: Sascha Pallenberg von Mobilegeeks spricht mit Volker Briegleb und Volker Zota über Google-Hardware, Fernseher, 4K, HDR, weiße Ware und noch viel mehr.

Auf vielfachen Wunsch gibts die #heiseshow von der IFA auch als Podcast: Sascha Pallenberg von Mobilegeeks spricht mit Volker Briegleb und Volker Zota über Google-Hardware, Fernseher, 4K, HDR, weiße Ware und noch viel mehr.

Auf vielfachen Wunsch gibts die #heiseshow von der IFA auch als Podcast: Sascha Pallenberg von Mobilegeeks spricht mit Volker Briegleb und Volker Zota über Google-Hardware, Fernseher, 4K, HDR, weiße Ware und noch viel mehr.

With Nilay out, Dieter brings in the editor of Circuit Breaker, Paul Miller, and news editor Jake Kastrenakes to discuss this week in tech. Racked senior reporter Nicola Fumo engages the hype matrix in this week's episode of Vergecast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices